Marie-Colette van Lieshout appointed professor in Spatial Stochastics

Starting 1 February 2015, Marie-Colette van Lieshout of CWI has been appointed Professor of Spatial Stochastics at the University of Twente, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. It concerns a part-time appointment for one day per week in the research group Stochastic Operations Research. The rest of the time she will remain affiliated with the Stochastics group at CWI.

Van Lieshout's research is in stochastic geometry and its applications, the branch of mathematics that concerns itself with modelling and analysing complicated geometrical structures. Important examples include point processes and random mosaics. To indicate the range of application areas, Van Lieshout and her co-workers showed that random mosaics are useful prior models for Bayesian image segmentation, sequential point processes can be used to recognise and track moving objects, and space-time marked point processes are important tools in producing earthquake hazard maps.

Van Lieshout obtained her MSc and PhD degrees in mathematics and statistics from VU University Amsterdam. From 1994 to 1997 she held a position as lecturer in the Statistics Department at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. In 1997 she moved to CWI to take up a position as senior researcher in the Signals and Images group, and later in the Stochastics group. She is the author of a textbook on Markov point processes.

More information: homepage of Marie-Colette van Lieshout