Dr Chris Brien

Welcome to my profile. My main research interest is the design and analysis of experiments, particularly the class of experiments that I have termed multitiered. I am also interested in the formulation of mixed models for the analysis of designed experiments, including  the analysis of longitudinal experiments. I originally graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972 with an agricultural science degree majoring in Biometry. I started my professional life as a consulting Biometrician with what was then the CSIRO Division of Horticultural Research, designing and analyzing viticultural, sensory and other laboratory experiments. After 6 years with CSIRO, I went to Roseworthy Agricultural College for a 10 year stint as a lecturer/consultant in statistics for agriculture, natural resources and oenology. During this time I completed a M.Ag.Sc. and began a PhD, both majoring in Biometry at the University of Adelaide. In 1988 I moved to the Institute of Technology, one of the institutions that in 1991 became the University of South Australia. Here I was a Senior Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and I lectured/consulted in statistics in areas such as business, engineering, environmental sciences, library studies, physiotherapy and computer science. In February 2006 I, and my colleague Prof. Rosemary Bailey from The University of St Andrews, Scotland, presented a read paper entitled Multiple randomizations to the prestigious Royal Statistical Society in London.

I retired from the University of South Australia in November 2009, but continued my research and consulting there as an Adjunct Associate Professor in Statistics until 2024. Since 2015, I have been employed part-time as the Senior Biometrician at the  Plant Accelerator that is part of the Australian Plant Phenomics Network and is hosted in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine at the University of Adelaide. In addition to continuing my work on multitiered experiments, I am currently working on the design and analysis of agricultural and other biological experiments. Particular areas of experimentation in which I work are in high-throughput, phenotyping experiments (see Brien et al., 2013;, Al-Tamimi et al., 2016; and Brien et al., 2020), sugarcane breeding experiments (Sermarini et al., 2020) and sustainable environments experiments. I also maintain three R packages on CRAN: dae, asremlPlus and growthPheno. Click here for my Curriculum Vitae (in a pdf file).