Professor William J Browne

Statistics - Computation, Methodology and Application to the social,  veterinary and biological sciences

My research spans the area of statistical modelling, from the development of statistical methods to fit realistically complex statistical models to describe real-life problems, through the implementation of those models in statistical software to the application of the methods in several application areas.

Further details of my work are available at http://seis.bris.ac.uk/~frwjb/

Much of my computational work has been in the development of statistical software within the Centre for Multilevel Modelling that I  now direct (ably supported by Professor Kelvyn Jones as deputy director) and in particular in the development of the MLwiN and StatJR packages.I have also developed the software package MLPowSim for performing power calculations for multilevel models.

My methodological work has been with regard MCMC methods for fitting these multilevel models and also for tailoring MCMC algorithms for specific other models.

With regard applications I have worked on applying multilevel and other statistical models to problems as diverse as assessing welfare in chickens, modelling herd breakdowns with TB in cattle, investigating nesting behaviour of great tits and the impact of class sizes on primary school children. Much of this work is in collaboration with discipline experts and I firmly believe that statistics and in particular statistical modelling is the glue that binds together interdisciplinary research

My research has been funded by various sources - my major funder has been the ESRC who have repeatedly funded my work over a 13 year period however I have also had my work or collaborative work funded by BBSRC, EPSRC, NERC, Wellcome, DEFRA, John Oldacre Foundation, RSPCA, DairyCo, UFAW and FAO.

Research keywords

• Multilevel Modelling
• MCMC
• Bayesian Statistics
• Random Effect Modelling
• Applied Statistics
• Computational Statistics