Rate My Professor Martin Hazelton

Professor Martin Hazelton is Professor of Statistics and Head of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago, where he has served since 2019. He earned his DPhil in Statistics and BA (Hons) in Mathematics, first class, from the University of Oxford between 1986 and 1993. His career includes roles as Research Officer at the University of Oxford's Transport Studies Unit, Lecturer in Statistical Science at University College London (1994-1997), Lecturer to Associate Professor in Statistics at the University of Western Australia (1997-2005), Chair of Statistics and Head of Statistics and Bioinformatics Group at Massey University (2006-2019), and Head of the Institute of Fundamental Sciences at Massey (2018-2019). At Otago, he directs studies for 400-level, Honours, Masters, and PhD programs in Statistics.

Hazelton's research focuses on smoothing methods such as kernel smoothing, spatially adaptive techniques, kernel deconvolution, and constrained spline smoothing; spatial statistics including point processes and relative risk functions; statistical modelling in transportation science like network tomography and dynamic traffic networks; and statistical linear inverse problems with Z-polytope sampling, applied to network tomography, contingency tables, capture-recapture, and biosecurity. He has published extensively in journals including Biometrika, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, Transportation Science, Bernoulli, and Statistics in Medicine. Key works include 'Some rapidly mixing hit-and-run samplers for latent counts in linear inverse problems' (Bernoulli, 2024, with McVeagh, Tuffley, van Brunt), 'Estimating Markov chain mixing times: Convergence rate towards equilibrium of a stochastic process traffic assignment model' (Transportation Science, 2024, with Iryo, Watling), 'Cross-validation bandwidth matrices for multivariate kernel density estimation' (Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 2005, with Duong), and 'Residual analysis for spatial point processes' (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, 2005, with Baddeley et al.). Awards include the New Zealand Statistical Association's Littlejohn Research Award (2014), Honorary Life Membership (2024), and the E.A. Cornish Lecture (2025). He was Editor-in-Chief of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics (2019-2025) and has led Marsden Fund grants such as 'Inference for statistical linear inverse problems: theory and practice' (2021-2024). Hazelton supervises PhD students and teaches courses like STAT310 Statistical Modelling.