In memory of Bill Laverty

Dr. William “Bill” H. Laverty (PhD), an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, passed away on March 8.  The following message was sent to members of the College of Arts and Science community by Dean Brooke Milne on March 17.

I am writing today with sadness about the loss of our colleague Prof. Bill Laverty of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics who passed away on March 8.

Bill will be remembered for his distinguished academic career spanning more than five decades as a statistician at USask. He was a kind, intelligent and generous colleague, brother, father, grandfather, uncle, and husband.

Bill completed his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees at the University of Toronto. He started at the University of Saskatchewan in 1972 as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics. He quickly became established within the department and earned tenure as an associate professor in 1985.  

Bill's generosity and intelligence were reflected in the time he spent mentoring graduate students and through his consulting work.

Early in his career, Bill established the Summer Statistical Consulting Laboratory in 1977. During the summer months, he volunteered to meet with more than two dozen people to help design and analyze statistical problems. He spent more than 150 hours meeting with individuals, studying and working on statistical problems. He was also part of the Mathematical Statistics Consulting lab at USask campus the following summer, where he assisted faculty and staff members with statistical consulting needs. Throughout his career, Bill provided expertise on experimental design, survey methodology, and data analysis.

From 1993 to 1995, Bill took a leave from USask to conduct applied research for the commercial arm of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. During this time, Bill and his wife, Rana, navigated working in Australia while raising a new baby.

While at USask, Bill taught a wide spectrum of undergraduate and graduate statistics courses, including probability theory, statistical methods, time series analysis, multivariate analysis, and linear models.

His teaching reached thousands of students across disciplines, and he supervised a substantial number of MSc theses across a wide range of topics, including hidden Markov models, mixture models, bootstrap methods, variance component models, and survey design. His mentorship contributed to the training of statisticians and researchers who applied statistical methodology in diverse fields.

His scholarly publications also focused on regression and experimental design, statistical computing, and applications in medicine, psychology, agriculture, sports science, and human–computer interaction.

He contributed to interdisciplinary research ranging from traffic accident analysis and biomedical studies to environmental and social science data analysis. He collaborated on research and industry projects involving biometric identification and speech recognition systems.

Through his teaching, research, and consulting activities, Bill made sustained contributions to the application of statistical science in both academic and real-world contexts.

A celebration of life will take place at Saskatoon Funeral Home on Saturday, March 21 at 10 am. The service will also be livestreamed.

Bill will be missed by his friends and colleagues across the college and university.

Sincerely,

Brooke Milne, PhD
Dean, College of Arts and Science
Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of Saskatchewan

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