Hideyasu Shimadzu, Geoscience Australia - CERF Prediction and Surrogates Program

Hideyasu received his MSc and PhD in Statistics under the supervision of Professor Ritei Shibata from Keio University in Japan. 

Just after the completion of his PhD study, he came to Australia and joined Geoscience Australia (GA).

During his time at university, Hideyasu was involved in several research projects using building models from data observed, especially according to time.  (These included time series models such as differential equations and stochastic processes.) He collaborated with scientists across a number of fields - biology, ecology and sport engineering - and very much enjoyed these experiences.

His introduction to marine ecology research came when he visited CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics at Cleveland (Queensland) as a research scholar, where he had an opportunity to be involved in an ongoing research project on estimating biomass distributions of species in Torres Strait.  It was about this time that Geoscience Australia advertised for a postdoctoral scientist for the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub.  As Hideyasu said “I could not have imagined that this opportunity would bring such dramatic changes and exciting experiences in my life.”

He continues to analyse data in an effort to understand the underlying patterns and processes/phenomena (ie biases, methods and uncertainty) in data collection.  “This helps us to understand models of species presence/absence, richness and biomass as outcomes of the underlying ecological systems.  As we cannot see the actual ecological systems, we need to better understand the data and models.  We then use the science of statistics to extract useful information from the observed data.” Hideyasu believes this involves building models that approximate the complex phenomena of interest rather than just applying simplistic methods (such as unthinking statistical tests). This cannot be done without understanding the background of the data - where the data comes from and why the data was collected. 

Hideyasu is currently collaborating with CSIRO scientists in the areas of mathematics, informatics and statistics to estimate marine biodiversity by exploring the influence of different data types.  The work covers the impact of sampling processes on biodiversity estimation and the use of spatially modelled physical covariates.