Noel Cressie is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, he is Director of the Centre for Environmental Informatics (CEI) in the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA), and he is Distinguished Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics, at the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia. He has been awarded over $20 million in extramural funding during his career in the US and Australia. He has (co-)authored four books, which includes the single-authored and widely cited (over 21, 430 citations, from Google Scholar; accessed, May 2021) 900-page book "Statistics for Spatial Data" (1991, 1993, 2015). Since the 2000s, Noel has been actively researching and applying spatio-temporal models using a hierarchical statistical framework, with major innovations that make spatial and spatio-temporal modelling computationally feasible for "big data." This research is synthesised in the award-winning (co-authored) books "Statistics for Spatio-Temporal Data" (2011, 2015) and "Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R" (2019). He has published over 350 articles/chapters/reviews/discussions in scholarly journals, edited books, and magazines which have been cited according to Scopus (accessed May 2021) more than 13,500 times with an h-index of 55.
Noel’s research focus is on developing statistical methodology and its applications for spatial and spatio-temporal data. He is a world leader in environmental informatics, particularly in statistical remote sensing developed for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on contracts and research projects. His methodological research is centrally Bayesian and empirical-Bayesian for big, complex, hierarchical statistical models, such as those used to infer global sources and sinks of carbon dioxide from satellite data.

Noel is a Chief Investigator and lead on the 2019 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, "Bayesian inversion and computation applied to atmospheric flux fields," which continues the research described in his 2018 discussion paper published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, a top-three statistics journal. The research is aiming to answer the critical carbon-cycle question, "Where are Earth’s carbon sources and sinks?", for mitigation of greenhouse-gas warming in the twenty-first century.
Noel is a Chief Investigator on an ARC Special Research Initiative (SRI) to carry out critical environmental research for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. The $36 million SRI, "Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF)," which is administered by Monash University, funds a seven-year (2020-2027) research program at UOW. It brings together top Antarctic physical scientists, marine and terrestrial biologists, and statistical scientists, who will use unique data sets and data from national programs in Australia and around the world, to make the best decisions for future Antarctic environmental management.
Noel is also using his expertise in spatial design and hierarchical statistical modelling in a new five-year (2020-2025) project with approximately 20 Curtin University researchers. His responsibilities are primarily in designing and analysing data on colour degradation and its causes for the (up-to 35,000-year-old) indigenous rock art of the Murujuga National Park (Pilbara, WA).
Noel has received many honours, awards, and fellowships. Among these, in 2009 he received from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) one of the highest awards in statistical science, the R.A. Fisher Award and Lectureship. In 2014, he was awarded the Pitman Medal by the Statistical Society of Australia for his outstanding achievements in the discipline of Statistics, and in 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. More on Noel Cressie’s background may be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Cressie