Professor, The University Chair, McGill University
Alexandra Schmidt was born in Nova Friburgo, a small town about 90 miles from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to a German father and Brazilian mother. Although she was raised in Brazil, the cultural mixture of her family had a significant effect on her life.
Schmidt’s parents valued education and, from an early age, provided access to supplementary English lessons for her and her sisters. Her fascination with computers started when she was 13 and her father brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. She learned to program in Basic on her own by replicating examples from a manual in German (which she still does not speak well). At the time, her plan was to pursue a career in computer science. Therefore, when she was 16, she moved to Rio de Janeiro to live with her sisters and improve her chances of being admitted to a prestigious federal university.
However, motivated by a high school teacher, Schmidt decided to study actuarial sciences instead of computer science. Then, an undergraduate introductory statistics lecturer suggested statistics might be more interesting to her than actuarial sciences. Further, he opened Schmidt’s mind to the possibility of pursuing a career in academia, which could involve studying abroad. “I always wanted to travel and experience different cultures,” she said.
Schmidt did her PhD with Tony O’Hagan in the United Kingdom, sponsored by a prestigious Brazilian scholarship (CNPq). O’Hagan suggested her PhD project and mentioned that it was challenging but had, if it worked, the potential to be a great contribution to the field. “Indeed, the project involved a lot of resilience and hard work,” Schmidt said. Their paper published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B has become a reference in deep Gaussian processes and led to Alan Gelfand inviting her to do a postdoc with him at the University of Connecticut. She was Gelfand’s first postdoc and, during an intense year working together, they developed a multivariate spatial model that also became a reference in spatial statistics.
Schmidt returned to Brazil in 2002, as she felt she could make important contributions to the Brazilian statistical community. “During my time there, I established myself as an international researcher in spatial and spatiotemporal statistics,” she said. However, in 2016, personal reasons motivated her to move to McGill University in Canada.
From the beginning of her career, Schmidt has been involved with statistical societies such as the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, American Statistical Association, Statistical Society of Canada, and International Statistical Institute, which has given her a sense of belonging and community. She was the first president of ISBA based in the global south. She says she enjoys creating opportunities for a younger generation of statisticians and organizing scientific meetings—such as the 2014 Pan-American Advanced Study Institute on Spatio-Temporal Statistics she organized with Peter Guttorp in Brazil—as she believes they positively affect early-career researchers. In 2022, she brought the ISBA World Meeting to Montréal, which was the first time such a big Bayesian event was held in Canada. Currently, she is a co-organizer of the ASA Committee on International Relations-Statistics Without Borders webinars, which aim to reach a worldwide audience, especially those based in the Global South.
“I feel lucky that, early on, I chose a career path that I love to this day,” Schmidt said. “Statistics has allowed me to meet interesting people—my partner included—and to experience different cultures and create opportunities for students from younger generations.”
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