Nadia Ghazzali


Nadia Ghazzali 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. 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.

Education and career

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

Recognition

At Laval, Ghazzali was given the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering in 2006. In the same year, she was named a corresponding member of the Hassan II Academy of Sciences and Technologies.