Session Date: Tuesday, November 19, in the morning session
Presentation Title: Interpretation and Measures of Variable Importance in Multivariate Data by Latent Variable Modeling
Sponsored by Eigenvector Research
Biography:
Olav M. Kvalheim received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Department of Chemistry, University of Bergen in 1987. His doctoral thesis was awarded a prize from The Nansen Foundation and Connected Funds in 1988. He was appointed as an Associate Professor in 1989 and as a Professor in Chemometrics/Analytical Chemistry at the University of Bergen in 1993. Since 2009 he has also been Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Health, Sogn and Fjordane University College. Kvalheim has published ca. 150 papers in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and many popular scientific articles. His research interests have focused on the development and application of chemometrics methods for interpreting complex real-world systems, both encountered in industrial settings and in the biomedical field, e.g., for revealing biomarkers in instrumental profiles mapping hundreds of chemical components. In 2005, Kvalheim received the Herman Wold Gold Medal for outstanding chemometrics research from the Chemometrics section of The Swedish Chemical Society.
Dr. Kvalheim built up Chemometrics as a discipline at the University of Bergen with courses at both undergraduate and post graduate levels, and is leading the research group for Chemometrics and Analytical Chemistry. He has supervised 20 Ph.D. students and 12 post-doctorate associates. He has given ca. 150 invited talks at conferences and universities all over the world as well as 50-100 short courses in academia and industry.
Dr. Kvalheim has also been active in commercialization of research. He is a co-founder of Pattern Recognition Systems AS, a research-oriented consulting and software company. Shared with his Ph.D. student Frode Brakstad, he received The Norwegian Research Council´s Prize for Outstanding Use of Research in 1996. Together with Chinese collaborators, he received a gold medal at The 40th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva in 2012 for an innovation providing rapid screening and ranking of bioactive components in complex mixtures of herbal extracts.
Kvalheim was a co-editor of Chemometrics & Intelligent Laboratory Systems (Elsevier) for ten years (1992-2002) and has been on the Advisory board of the journal since it was launched in 1986. He was an advisory editor for the book series “Data Handling in Science and Technology” (Elsevier) in 1988-92 and a co-editor of the Scandinavian book “Application of Chemometrics in Research and Industry” in 1996. He was a co-founder of the Chemometrics division of the Norwegian Chemical Society and its first chairman in 1989-91.