Nadia Ghazzali

Nadia Ghazzali (born April 3, 1961) is a Canadian statistician, the former president of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, where she continues to work as a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science.^[1] As a statistician, she is known for her work on NbClust, a package in the R statistical software system for determining the number of clusters in a data set.^[2]

Education and career

Ghazzali was born on April 3, 1961,^[3] in Casablanca. After studying at the University of Rennes 1 in France,^[4] she came to Canada as a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, and joined the faculty at the Université Laval in 1993.^[3]

She was president of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières from 2012 until 2015, when she resigned after facing criticism from the Auditor General of Québec over management practices in university construction.^[5][6][7]

Ghazzali is current (2021-2023) Deputy President of INWES, the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists.

Recognition

At Laval, Ghazzali was given the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (CWSE) in 2006.^[3][8] In the same year, she was named a corresponding member of the Hassan II Academy of Sciences and Technologies.^[3]