Rate My Professor Francis Hui

Associate Professor Francis Hui is a statistician in the Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics within the Australian National University's College of Business and Economics. He holds a BSc/BA and PhD from the University of New South Wales. Hui began his career at ANU as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mathematical Sciences Institute in 2015, advancing to Lecturer from 2017 to 2019, Senior Lecturer from 2020 to 2023, and Associate Professor in Statistics since 2024.

His research specializes in modern statistical methods for complex multivariate data, including approximate and composite likelihood estimation, model selection and averaging, spatial and temporal modeling, sufficient dimension reduction, and joint species distribution models for community ecology. These approaches address challenges in ecological monitoring, such as vulnerability assessments for the Great Barrier Reef, climate impacts on Arctic plant communities, and sustainable fisheries management in Chile, as well as insurance mortality forecasting and longitudinal data analysis. Key publications include "Restricted maximum likelihood estimation in Generalized linear mixed models" (Maestrini, Hui, Welsh; accepted 2025, Statistical Science), "Spatial confounding in joint species distribution models" (Hui et al.; 2024, Methods in Ecology and Evolution), "Adjusted predictions for generalized estimating equations" (2025, Biometrics), "A compositional approach to modelling cause-specific mortality with zero counts" (Dong et al.; accepted 2025, Annals of Actuarial Science), and "gllvm 2.0: fast fitting of advanced ordination methods and joint species distribution models" (2025, PeerJ). He has developed widely used R packages such as boral, gllvm, and rpql for Bayesian ordination and regression analysis in ecology.

Hui's excellence is evidenced by awards including the Christopher Heyde Medal from the Australian Academy of Science (2022) for contributions to statistical methodology and applications, ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE200100435; 2020-2023), President's Award for Leadership in Statistics from the Statistical Society of Australia (2022), and Prize for Excellence in Research from ANU College of Business and Economics (2022). He serves as Co-Editor of the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics (2025-) and Associate Editor for Biometrics (2025-) among other roles. His grants total over $2.5 million, including multiple ARC Discovery Projects and a $1.9 million Grains Research and Development Corporation project. With approximately 8,900 citations and an h-index of 33 on Google Scholar, his work significantly influences statistics, ecology, and actuarial science.