Robert Clark started his career in Statistics with an Honours Degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Queensland in 1990. This was supported by an Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) cadetship. Robert was then employed by the ABS Methodology Division in Canberra, where he worked for the next 14 years as an applied statistician, manager, trainer, and statistical consultant. One highlight was managing a redesign of the ABS household sample design framework in 1996 including personally conducting research into the optimization of cluster sizes. Robert was awarded the Ken Foreman Award in 1996 for outstanding achievement and potential of a young methodologist. This award included travel to other government statistical offices in North America, giving an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches and ideas in official statistics. A recent exciting role was the management of a section of 15 staff providing methodological leadership to ABS business surveys. While working at the ABS, Robert completed a Master in Statistics degree part-time at the Australian National University (awarded 1995). More recently, he completed a Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Wollongong, including a one-year exchange at the University of Southampton. Robert's thesis on Sample Design and Estimation for Household Surveys was supervised by Professor David Steel and also benefited from advice from Professors Ray Chambers and Chris Skinner. Robert took up a position at the University of Wollongong in 2004. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Centre for Statistical and Survey Methodology, which is located in the School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics Field of Study: Survey sampling, sample design, sampling rare populations, analysis of complex survey data, spatial statistics Professional Activities and Affiliations: • Deputy Director of the newly formed Centre for Statistical and Survey Methodology • Major Contractor with the New Zealand (NZ) Ministry of Health, advising on the design and analysis of the continuous NZ Health Survey and other statistical problems • Lead CI on an ARC linkage grant on Handling Missing Data in Complex Household Surveys with industry partner the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2007-2011) • Associate Editor, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (2012-2015) • Ask the Expert column editor, International Association of Survey Statisticians Newsletter (2010- ) • Associate Editor, Journal of Official Statistics (2002-2009) • Associate Editor (Applications), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics (2003-2009) • Accredited Statistician (Statistical Society of Australia Inc) since 2004 • Herriot Student Travel Award Recipient, awarded by the American Statistical Association (included travel funding to present at a special session of the 2002 ASA Conference) • Delegate, Australian Bureau of Statistics Leadership Program 1997 • Ken Foreman Award for outstanding achievement and potential of a young methodologist at the ABS, inaugural recipient 1996 (the award included travel to a conference and national statistical agencies in North America) Current Research Students: • Luise Lago : Handling Missing Data in Complex Household Surveys • Li-Chia Yeh : Design and Analysis of Nutrition Surveys • James Chipperfield : Split Question
Articles
Oxygen exchange during the reaction of POCl3 and water (with Robert J. Morrison, Andrew Thomas, Rebeca Alvarez, and Paul J. Milham), Faculty of Science - Papers (2011)
To investigate O exchange during the reaction of POCl3 and water, natural abundance POCl3 was...
Robust Resampling Confidence Intervals for Empirical Variograms (with Samuel F. Allingham), Faculty of Informatics - Papers (2011)
The variogram function is an important measure of the spatial dependenciesof a geostatistical or other...
Further Simulation Results on Resampling Confidence Intervals for Empirical Variograms (with S. Allingham), Centre for Statistical & Survey Methodology Working Paper Series (2010)
Clark and Allingham (2010) described and evaluated a number of replication-based confidence intervals for the...
Preliminary sample design for the New Zealand Health Survey 2010, Faculty of Informatics - Papers (2010)
This report describes the choice of the preliminary design for the New Zealand Health Survey,...
Adaptive Inference for Multi-Stage Survey Data (with L. M. Al-Zou'bi and D. G. Steel), Centre for Statistical & Survey Methodology Working Paper Series (2009)
Two-stage sampling usually leads to higher variances for estimators of means and regression coefficients, because...
Presentations
Accounting for the uncertainty of information on clustering in the design of a clustered sample (with David Steel), Faculty of Informatics - Papers (2006)
An important decision that has to be made in developing the design of a cluster...