About Dr. Haiza

Dr. Norhaiza is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). She graduated with a first class honours degree in Mathematics, Statistics and Operational research from the University of Manchester, Institute of Science of Technology (UMIST) in 1996. After graduating, she worked as a Production Planner and Production Controller at an automotive subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation in Shah Alam. Her invaluable experience working in the automotive industry has helped her tremendously in getting away from the conventional dogma of ‘theoretical’ classroom teaching by relating to the students the ‘practical’ side of being a statistician.

After four years working in the private sector, she joined UTM in August 2000. In the following year, she continued her studies at the University of Sheffield for her masters degree. In Sheffield, she developed an interest in multivariate analysis, specifically in finding patterns which lead her to pursue a PhD degree at the University of Kent. She completed her PhD thesis at the end of 2007 and was conferred a doctorate degree in 2008. She has always believed that her postgraduate journey provided her with one of the best training ground to become an effective statistician and academician.

Finding patterns in any data have always been her research interests. She started the interests in profiling data – finding statistically distinctive and significant groups and features in the object of interest whilst at Sheffield. For her masters dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Eleanor Stillman, she was involved in investigating the profile of people working at the Sheffield Municipal, Works and Pension Department. In consequence, her PhD study followed this strand of investigation. During her PhD tenure, she had the opportunity to work on Proteomics, a rapidly developing area of biological research. Proteomics is a study of the structure, function and interaction of a complete set of proteins. Here, she studied the profile of a large scale protein expression dataset on a series of cell lines with different recombinant antibody production rates using a clustering strategy under the tutelage of Prof. Jian Zhang and Prof. Phil Brown at the University of Kent. Currently, her research interests revolve around hydroinformatics particularly in investigating the streamflow variability of the local rivers.

Dr. Norhaiza teaches several courses in the department and services other faculties at UTM, including Computer Literacy, Engineering Statistics and Multivariate Analysis. She teaches R for first year students and has been a user and advocate of R since 2007. She is currently the coordinator for the Mathematics Computer Lab at the Faculty of Science and webmaster for the Department’s website.

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