UBC Statistics welcomes Dr. Jonathan Wakefield to our department, beginning September 1, 2026. Dr. Wakefield is one of nine world-leading researchers joining UBC through the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program. This program aims to strengthen Canada’s research capacity, train future talent, and drive innovation in areas critical to global competitiveness.
Dr. Wakefield’s research interest lies in biostatistics, specifically the intersection of methodology and global health, with special interests in spatial demography, small area estimation, spatial epidemiology, space-time models for infectious disease data, hierarchical models for survey data, ecological inference for non-infectious and infectious disease data, and links between Bayesian and frequent procedures.
Since 2021, Dr. Wakefield has been a part of the World Health Organization (WHO) Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on COVID-19 Mortality Assessment and was responsible for leading the model development efforts, which produced estimates of excess mortality over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. From 1990 to 2019, Dr. Wakefield also worked in close coordination with the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), which uses data to support child and adolescent cause-specific mortality data generation, estimation, and use of estimates for policy and program decision-making.
Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Wakefield held a joint position in the Departments of Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Washington (1999-2026). From 2006 to 2007, he spent a year in the Genetic Epidemiology group at the International Agency for Research in Cancer in Lyon, France, before returning to the University of Washington, where he served as head of the Department of Statistics from 2009 to 2011. Dr. Wakefield completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham under the supervision of Dr. Adrian Smith.
Outside of statistics, Dr. Wakefield is a fan of comedy (Tony Hancock and Laurel and Hardy) and music. He is also an avid traveller.
We are excited to have Dr. Wakefield join UBC Statistics and look forward to the expertise and perspective he will bring to our department and the broader UBC community.