Heather Turner is a research fellow in the Lancaster-Warwick node of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, working on computational aspects of complex mixed-effects models and applications to longitudinal data.

On her previous research project with Professor David Firth, Heather co-wrote the gnm package for fitting generalized nonlinear models in R. Heather and David were awarded the 2007 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award for this work. For more information on gnm, see the recent newsletter articles introducing the package and the gnm webpage. 

Heather completed her PhD entitled "Biclustering Microarray Data: Some Extensions of the Plaid Model" in 2005. This work was supervised by Trevor Bailey and Wojtek Krzanowski at The University of Exeter. Material related to this work, along with other talks and papers can be found below.

Teaching 

• ST952 Introduction to Statistical Practice
  
• ST409 Medical Statisics

Recent Talks/Posters

• Custom Functions for Specifying Nonlinear Terms to gnm. useR! 2008, Dortmund, Germany, August 2008. This describe how useRs can extend the capability of the gnm function, using novel discrete-time hazard models as an illustration.

• Nonlinear Discrete-time Hazard Models for the Rate of First Marriage. International Workshop on Statistical Modelling 2007, Barcelona, Spain, July 2007. This poster incorporates a simplification of the proposed hazard models further to the corresponding proceedings paper.

• gnm: a Package for Generalized Nonlinear Models. useR! 2006, Vienna, Austria, June 2006. This gives an introduction to the gnm package. The package has a dedicated webpage and may be downloaded from CRAN.

• Multiplicative Interaction Models in R. 2005 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2005), Minneapolis, MN, USA, August 2005. This describes the use of the gnm package to fit multiplicative interaction models. This talk was awarded the 2006 Best Contributed Presentation Award of the ASA Statistical Computing Section.

• Clustering Microarray Data. Eigth North American Meeting of New Researchers in Statistics and Probablity (NRC), Minneapolis, USA, August 2005. This was based on Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis, which contains more detail and further references.

Newsletter Articles (links are to online newsletters)

• gnm: A Package for Generalized Nonlinear Models.  Turner, H. and Firth,  D., R News, 2007, 7/2 8-12, R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
  
• Generalized Nonlinear Models in R   Turner, H. and Firth, D., Statistical Computing & Graphics Newsletter, 2007, 18(1) 11-16, Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association. 

Working Papers (links are to department working papers site)

• Nonlinear discrete-time hazard models for entry into marriage. Batchelor, A., Turner, H. and Firth, D., CRiSM Working Paper 07-16.

Publications (links are to online journal content)

• Biclustering Models for Structured Microarray Data. Turner, H.L., Bailey, T.C., Krzanowski, W.J. and Hemingway, C.A., IEEE/ACM Trans. Comp. Biol. Bioinf., 2005, 2(4), 316-329. Supplementary Material (R code).
• Improved Biclustering of Microarray Data Demonstrated through Systematic Performance Tests. Turner, H., Bailey, T. and Krzanowski, W., Comput. Statist. Data Anal., 2005, 48(2), 235-254.
• Fitting and comparing seed germination models with a focus on the inverse normal distribution. O’Neill, M.E., Thomson, P.C., Jacobs, B.C., Brain, P., Butler, R.C., Turner, H. and Mitakda, B., Aust. N. Z. J. Stat., 2004, 46(3), 349-366.
• Effect of plantation design on stem-infecting form of rust in willow biomass coppice. Hunter T., Peacock L., Turner H. and Brain, P., Forest Pathology, 2002, 32(2), 87-97.
• Does host genotype diversity affect the distribution of insect and disease damage in willow cropping systems? Peacock L., Hunter T., Turner H., and Brain P., Journal of Applied Ecology, 2001, 38(5), 1070-1081.

Dr Heather Turner
Department of Statistics
The University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL

+44(0) 2476 575754