Camila de SouzaView profile
Associate Professor
Camila de Souza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences within the Faculty of Science at Western University. She serves as Vice-director of Western Data Science Solutions (WDSS) and interim director of the Master of Data Analytics professional program, bridging advanced statistical methodology with real-world applications across healthcare, environmental science, and engineering domains. Her educational foundation includes a PhD in Statistics from the University of British Columbia, complemented by Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Statistics from Brazil's University of Campinas. This international training informs her interdisciplinary approach to complex data challenges. De Souza's research program develops cutting-edge statistical methods for analyzing large-scale complex data structures, with particular expertise in Bayesian variational inference, clustering algorithms, hierarchical mixture models, and survival analysis. Her work on hidden Markov models and nonparametric regression enables breakthroughs in fields ranging from ICU patient monitoring to astronomical data interpretation, consistently addressing methodological gaps in handling high-dimensional and heterogeneous datasets. Recent publications reveal a pronounced trend toward healthcare analytics applications, particularly in intensive care settings where her survival analysis models predict mechanical ventilation duration and patient flow optimization. Simultaneously, she extends statistical frameworks for environmental risk assessment (tornado-flood hazards) and energy systems through functional data analysis, demonstrating remarkable methodological versatility across disciplines. Her scientific recognition includes: 2014 Journal of Nonparametric Statistics Best Student Paper Award De Souza actively mentors doctoral candidates Ana Carolin Da Cruz and Chengqian Xian alongside MSc student Renan S. Barbosa, while securing research funding from natural sciences and health councils. Her supervisory approach emphasizes methodological rigor coupled with domain-specific application, preparing students for careers at the statistics-data science interface. Through WDSS, she leads a team providing statistical consulting services across Western University's research ecosystem, while shaping the Master of Data Analytics curriculum to meet industry demands for advanced modeling capabilities in an era of exponential data growth.







