Staff profile

Petra is a Research Statistician in Data61 with over 40 published articles in high ranking applied journals (H-Index 15). She has a PhD in applied statistics with her interests focussing more recently on managing model uncertainty and its communication for decision making, the development of data assimilation methods for blending modelled output with measurements, investigating elicitation practices with experts on risk related issues and the translation and synthesis of expert opinion into priors to inform Bayesian models.

Petra was a CSIRO Julius Award recipient in 2010, which provided her with an opportunity to develop strong linkages with international collaborators from leading statistics institutions in the areas of spatio-temporal modelling, data assimilation, Bayesian Hierarchical Modelling, expert elicitation and managing model uncertainty.

Petra was awarded the 2013 Abdel El-Shaarawi Young Investigator Award for significant interdisciplinary collaboration and impact, the promotion and development of cutting edge statistical methods in the environmental sciences, particularly in water quality, fisheries, and ecological research, and strong contributions to expert elicitation, Bayesian hierarchical modelling, and non¬‐parametric regression.

Petra was an associate editor of Environmetrics between 2013 and 2014 and has recently edited a special issue of the journal on the topic of Physical-Statistical Modelling. She has also been invited to contribute an article entitled “Physical-Statistical Modeling” for the Wiley StatsRef-Statistics Reference Online.

Petra was recently an invited speaker at the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) conference, where she spoke about a Bayesian approach for blending modelled output with measurements for more confident reporting of sediment loads entering in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.