Shirley Mills

Shirley Mills is a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University, where she has held roles including Assistant Professor, Director of the Statistical Consulting Centre (1987–1994), and current co-leader of the Anomaly Detection, Prediction, and Modeling (ADPM) Lab at the Fields Institute-Government of Ontario. She serves as Executive Director of the Statistical Society of Canada and leads sports analytics initiatives, including hockey analytics conferences. Her work bridges academia and industry, focusing on fraud detection, cybersecurity, and statistical applications in health and sports.

• Education: BSc Hons (1969), MSc (1970) in Mathematics from University of Manitoba; PhD in Statistics and Applied Probability (1983) from University of Alberta.

Research interests include anomaly detection (e.g., phishing emails, cancer early detection, network intrusions), data mining methodologies, and sports performance analytics. She co-founded the Statistical Association of Manitoba and developed Canada’s first graduate data mining course, now Carleton’s most popular graduate math/statistics course.

Awards: 2019 Honoured Alumni Award (Faculty of Science), 2015 Distinguished Service Award (Statistical Society of Canada), and teaching awards from multiple universities.

Advances academic-industry collaboration through interdisciplinary projects (e.g., software reliability, alcohol/drug studies) and mentors students in applied statistics, including work on air pollution-cancer links and crime pattern analysis. Her lab also explores work-family stress studies and predictive analytics for sports injury prevention.