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Benjamin Bolker

Benjamin Bolker, Ph.D., is Professor of Mathematics & Statistics and Biology at McMaster University.

Professor Bolker has broad interests in computational statistics and population biology including mixed models, infectious disease dynamics, evolution of virulence, animal movement, and spatial population dynamics. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, including one listed in the top 25 most-cited papers of the 21st century. He has also written two books, Ecological Models and Data in R, which has been a gateway to advanced statistical modeling for many ecologists, and Infectious Disease: A Very Short Introduction (co-authored with Marta Wayne) for general readers.

He is also well known for supporting researchers using mixed models and doing statistical analyses in ecology through his development and maintenance of widely used R packages (`lme4`, `glmmTMB`, `bbmle`), with millions of downloads and tens of thousands of literature citations, as well as answering questions in forums such as Stack Overflow. He directs the School of Computational Science and Engineering at McMaster and serves as associate chair (graduate) for Mathematics. He is a long-time associate editor for the leading ecology and evolution journal, American Naturalist.

You can visit his university webpage here.

Google Scholar Citation Page

Benjamin's Seminars
Livestream

Mixed Models in the Wild: Techniques, Workflows, and Challenges

Professor Benjamin Bolker introduces mixed (multilevel/hierarchical) models, including foundational concepts, software tools, and challenges in fitting and interpreting these models.

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