Biographical Notes on Lunch Speakers

Gordon Cleveland

Dr. Gordon Cleveland is an Economist in the Department of Management at University of Toronto Scarborough and Honorary Senior Fellow at the Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. He has devoted his research career as an economist to analyzing the economics of early childhood education. With co-authors, he has studied the costs and benefits of universal good-quality child care services in Canada, the financing of child care systems in OECD countries, the effect of child care costs on mothers’ employment, the determinants of the wages of child care workers, the determinants of quality in early childhood care services, and the impact of non-profit status on the production of quality in child care. He is currently a collaborating investigator on a longitudinal study of Australian children and their early education and care experiences.


Bradley A. Corbett

Bradley A. Corbett, PhD, is a Research Data Centre Analyst for Statistics Canada and holds an Adjunct Research Professorship in the Faculty of Social Science, Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. He has most recently been applying growth modeling in clinical trial settings through his private consulting company, Population Health Intelligence Inc.


Michael Friendly

Michael Friendly is Professor of Psychology, Chair of the graduate program in Quantitative Methods at York University, and an Associate Coordinator with the Statistical Consulting Service. He received his doctorate in Psychology from Princeton University, specializing in Psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology.

In addition to his research interests in psychology, Professor Friendly has broad experience in data analysis, statistics and computer applications. He is the author of SAS for Statistical Graphics, 1st Edition and Visualizing Categorical Data, both published by SAS Institute, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. His recent work includes the further development of graphical methods for categorical data and multivariate linear models, as well as work on the history of data visualization. See datavis.ca for further information.


George Leckie

Dr.George Leckie joined the Centre for Multilevel Modelling at the University of Bristol in 2005. His main research interests are in applying multilevel modelling methodology to address research questions in social science and educational research that are complicated by complex structured data. His applications of multilevel modelling include: highlighting statistical limitations of England’s school league tables; assessing the quality of marking of England’s national curriculum key stage educational tests; and modelling social and ethnic segregation among schools and neighbourhoods. His multilevel modelling methodological interests are driven by substantive applications and include: mixture models, variance models, cross-classified models, and multiple membership models. His recent research (with Harvey Goldstein), on the limitations of using school league tables to inform school choice, received considerable attention in the press, including: BBC Radio 4, Financial Times, The Telegraph and The Times Educational Supplement. Please see The limitations of using school league tables to inform school choice for further information.


Guiping Liu

Dr. Guiping Liu is the Research Coordinator at the Centre on Aging, University of Victoria. Before coming to Canada, Guiping worked for more than ten years on the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey in Beijing, as well as carrying out research at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, on family dynamics using the Swedish Population Register database. In his current position, he has analysed data from the SC National Population Health Survey, the Canadian Community Health Survey and the General Social Survey. His present work includes analysis of the longitudinal Canadian Study of Healthy Aging, as well as the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.


Todd Milford

Todd Milford is an Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria and holds a PhD (Victoria) in measurement and evaluation. He currently works with Dr. John Anderson in the modeling of large scale international academic achievement data (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) with HLM. The PISA project is the subject of today’s presentation. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provides reliable and timely data on the mathematics and science achievement of U.S. 4th- and 8th-grade students compared to that of students in other countries. TIMSS data have been collected in 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007.


Patricia O'Campo

Dr. Patricia O’Campo is Director of the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael's Hospital, Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US. As a social epidemiologist, she has been conducting research on the social determinants of health and well-being among women and children for over 20 years. She has focused on methods development and has conducted a number of survey-based and longitudinal studies in the areas of the social determinants of adult mental health, intimate partner violence and children’s well-being, as well as clinic- and community-based evaluations of programs concerning smoking cessation, prevention of perinatal transmission of HIV, and prevention of infant mortality. She has been widely recognized for her contributions to the well-being of women and children through the receipt of early and mid-career awards given by national organizations in the US, and serves on several local, federal and international committees and boards, such as the Board of the Wellesley Institute in Toronto, the Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System committee, and the US National Academy of Sciences Board on Children, Youth and Families.

For further information, please see:

Violence by Male Partners against Women during the Childbearing Year: A Contextual Analysis

Neighborhood Risk Factors for Low Birthweight in Baltimore: A Multilevel Analysis

Neighborhood Deprivation and Preterm Birth among Non-Hispanic Black and White Women in Eight Geographic Areas in the United States


Michael Ornstein

Michael Ornstein is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of ISR, where he is responsible for research methodology. Recently he has conducted research on socio-economic differences among ethno-racial groups, occupational and educational mobility in Canada, and gender differences in university pay and promotion.


Dana Riley

Dana Riley is a Ph.D. candidate in Population Health at the University of Ottawa. Dana has carried out research using mixed methods, and contributed to professional publications in the area of the continuity of cardiac care. She has used several analytical approaches in her research, including time series analysis and propensity score matching. Ottawa’s Family Heart Health Program is the subject of her dissertation research.


Imelda Wong

Imelda Wong is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Environmental Health at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation explores the association between workplace stress and heart disease among paramedics. There are three parts to this study: a sampling portion at the individual level which examines the biological pathway linking stress and heart disease through biomarker response and sub-clinical health indicators; a nested case-control study using administrative data and information gathered from the sampling study to form exposure variables; and a population survey to compare the paramedic population to the general population. To keep her own stress levels down, Imelda is a member of the Canadian Long Distance Triathlon Team and participates in ultra-distance swimming and running.


Ann Yew

Ann Yew is a Ph.D. Candidate in Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University. In her doctoral work, Ann is interested in integrating temporal and spatial information useful for understanding the determinants of health. She has worked on the Multicultural Health Assessment Trial (Aboriginal, Asian, European and South Asian Canadians), as well as the project PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiologic study), a 17-country/10-year study, the data from which are subject to analysis for her dissertation.

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