Rate My Professor Greg Trounson

Greg Trounson is the Team Leader for ITS Scientific Programming at the University of Otago, primarily supporting the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He earned a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Otago. Trounson joined the department in April 2000 as a Computer Programmer and has since progressed to his current leadership role. His office is situated in Science III, room 421c, with contact available via telephone at +64 3 479 7739.

Trounson's professional contributions focus on technical support and development of tools for teaching and research in statistics and mathematics. He co-developed and updated the 'Statistics in Research' online lessons and website alongside Matthew Schofield, John Harraway, and Jessica Allen, funded by a committee on university teaching. He has provided essential assistance for R package applications including secrapp and secrdesignapp, encompassing hosting at the University of Otago, testing, debugging, and implementation improvements. His expertise in deploying Shiny applications is acknowledged in publications such as 'Fast evaluation of study designs for spatially explicit capture-recapture' by Efford et al. (2019) and 'A Nearest-Neighbour Gaussian Process Spatial Factor Model' by Davies et al. (2022). Numerous PhD theses from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, including those on wind-flow dynamics, slow slip events, wave-ice interactions, and resonant wave scattering, credit Trounson for IT support, software aid, and administrative assistance. He maintains a personal webpage featuring educational web games like Hungry Black Hole for mathematics and statistics. Additionally, Trounson enabled Zoom functionality for New Zealand Statistical Association meetings and contributed to official statistics web apps presented at international conferences, such as those by Sharleen Forbes and John Harraway.