We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers: Distinguished Professor Mark S. Handcock, and the 2023 Pip Pattison Award winner Dr Johan Koskinen.

Mark S. Handcock

Mark S. Handcock is Distinguished Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Data Science a the University of California, Los Angeles. His work focuses on statistical models for social networks, the development of statistical methodology for the collection and analysis of social network data, surveying of hard-to-sample populations, spatial processes and demography. His research is based largely on motivation from questions in the social sciences, social epidemiology and environmetrics. For details, see his web page https://faculty.stat.ucla.edu/handcock.

Johan H. Koskinen

Johan obtained his PhD in statistics at Stockholm University, working on Bayesian estimation for statistical models for social networks under the supervision of Ove Frank. He has largely continued in this area, for example proposing approaches for handling missing network data and techniques for likelihood-based inference for network panel data of different types. Together with colleagues in Melbourne, he edited a book on exponential random graph models that has become the standard reference in the field. He previously has held positions at the universities of Melbourne, Oxford, and Manchester and is currently holding a position in the Department of Statistics at Stockholm University. In-between stints being employed at the University of Melbourne, he has been a reliable visitor to these shores, maintaining an honorary position throughout, and he keeps up close collaborations with the Australian network community. He has been in Melbourne for every Ashes Boxing day test since the 2006/7 series. Throughout his career he has maintained an interest in fundamental network issues, such as how we can represent networks, what network dependencies are, and how many observations we have in a network.