I’m delighted that Professor Dianne Cook will be joining Monash University in July 2015 as a Professor of Business Analytics. Di is an Australian who has worked in the US for the past 25 years, mostly at Iowa State University. She is moving back to Australia and joining the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics in the Monash Business School, as part of our initiative in Business Analytics.

Di is a world leader in data visu­al­iza­tion, and is well-​​known for her work on inter­ac­tive graph­ics. She is also the academic supervisor of several leading data scientists including Hadley Wickham and Yihui Xie, both of whom work for RStudio.

Di has a great deal of energy and enthusiasm for computational statistics and data visualization, and will play a key role in developing and teaching our new subjects in business analytics.

The Monash Business School is already exceptionally strong in econometrics (ranked 7th in the world on RePEc), and forecasting (ranked 11th on RePEc), and we have recently expanded into actuarial science. With Di joining the department, we will be extending our expertise in the area of data visualization as well.