Rate My Professor Ian Renner

Associate Professor Ian Renner is a faculty member in the School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Newcastle. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Valparaiso University, a Master of Statistics from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Statistics from the University of New South Wales in 2013. Following his doctorate, he held a postdoctoral position and earlier roles including Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant at the University of New South Wales before joining the University of Newcastle as a lecturer and advancing to his current position as Associate Professor. He also serves as Deputy Head of School for Teaching and Learning in the School of Computer and Information Sciences.

Renner’s research focuses on species distribution models for presence-only data and ecological statistics. He has contributed to unifying point process models and MAXENT methods and developed the PPM-LASSO approach, which he implements through the R package ppmlasso. His work includes publications on topics such as combining multiple data sources in species distribution models, handling uncertain presence-only data, and applications in conservation planning. Renner received the EJG Pitman Prize in 2010 and the JB Douglas Award in 2011 from the Statistical Society of Australia.