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 graduation, 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 as an academic staff member in August 2000. The following year, she continued her studies at the University of Sheffield for her Master’s degree. In Sheffield, she developed a keen interest in multivariate analysis, particularly in discovering patterns within data. This interest later led her to pursue a PhD at the University of Kent, England. She completed her PhD thesis at the end of 2007 and was conferred a doctorate degree in 2008. She considers her postgraduate journey as one of the best training grounds that strengthened her professional growth as both a statistician and an academician.
Finding patterns in any data have always been her research interests. She started the interests in data profiling, seeking to identify statistically distinctive and significant groups and features within complex datasets. Her Master’s dissertation at the University of Sheffield, supervised by Dr. Eleanor Stillman, involved profiling employees at the Sheffield Municipal, Works and Pension Department, where she explored various statistical approaches to uncover underlying structures in multivariate data.
In consequence, her PhD study followed this strand of investigation. During her PhD tenure at the University of Kent, she had the opportunity to work on proteomics, which at the time was a rapidly developing area of biological research concerned with the structure, function and interaction of proteins. She developed clustering strategies for large-scale protein expression data, analyzing cell lines with different recombinant antibody production rates, under the supervision of Prof. Jian Zhang and Prof. Phil Brown.
Currently, her research interests extends to hydroinformatics, particularly in investigating and modelling streamflow variability in local river systems. Her broader interests include multivariate analysis, data-driven modelling and pattern recognition across industrial, environmental and socio-economic applications.
At UTM, Dr. Norhaiza teaches several courses offered by the department as well as service courses for other faculties, including Computer Literacy, Engineering Statistics and Multivariate Analysis. She integrates R programming into her courses and has been an active user and advocate of R since 2007. She also serves as the Coordinator of the Mathematics Computer Lab, and Webmaster for the Department of Mathematical Sciences.
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