SFU Research Masterclass Series: "Never had a real job and pretty happy about it"

About the Speaker

About the interviwee: Richard Lockhart’s only experience with real work dates to 1973 when he was a bus boy on the Queen of Victoria sailing Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay. Having finished high school in Delta the previous year he did Mathematics at UBC then a PhD at Berkeley, getting an MA for passing the comps along the way. After a 6 month post-doc at the Université de Montréal he started at SFU in September 1979. He has been here, except for a job at U of T for 1 year and some sabbaticals, ever since. He nearly didn’t get tenure, having, at the time, no research program. The problem appears not to have been rectified in the interval. He is author or co-author of papers about transfinite induction, traffic loads on the Lion’s Gate bridge, finding downed aircraft, estimating the age of sediments, limit theory for high dimensional random quadratic forms, zeros of cosine polynomials, a decent variety of large sample approximations in statistics, goodness-of-fit methods and other stuff like that. His advice to younger people is to do something well and he hopes to take his own advice some day.

About the Interviewer: Dr. Rachel Altman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. She completed a BSc in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo and an MSc in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering at Cornell University. In 2003 Dr. Altman obtained a PhD in Statistics at the University of British Columbia. She joined SFU in 2004. Dr. Altman's research area is in Biostatistics with a particular interest in hidden Markov and other latent variable models, as well as survival time models.