Catherine Forbes is Professor, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Education for the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS).

Catherine Forbes is Professor, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Education for the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics (EBS). She is an elected member of the International Statistics Institute, an adjunct Professor at Sunway University, Malaysia, an Associate Editor of Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, and has been elected or appointed to several leaderships roles within the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). She has supervised 20 PhD students, 5 MPhil students and 20 Honours projects and served as EBS Director of Graduate Research from July 2022 through December 2024.

With expertise in Bayesian statistics and econometrics, Professor Forbes has published in the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, the Journal of Econometrics, Biometrika, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, amongst many other highly regarded international journals. Her work has primarily focused on the development of new inferential methods, such as Familial inference, and on computational methods suitable for Bayesian analysis of multiple time series exhibiting complex nonlinear and stochastic relationships. A key theme of her work is to develop models of financial risks and their dynamic interaction with other factors that drive observed asset prices.  

Professor Forbes has received over A$2 million in external research grants, including 2 ARC grants and an NHMRC grant, and has produced 16 major contract research reports. In collaboration with the Centre of Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, now the peak body for child and family services across Victoria and Tasmania, Professor Forbes co-developed empirically-based measures to predict life outcomes of Australian young people leaving the Victorian out-of-home care system. The work produced provided a rigorous analytical foundation for the policy debate, and has been credited with helping to propel the introduction of the Victorian Children, Youth and Families Act 2005, thereby ensuring support for care leavers up to age of 21 from 18 years.

Research interests include

• Bayesian modelling and computation
• Moment-based inference
• Nonparametric methods
• Financial econometrics
• Robustness methods
• Statistics for good

PhD supervision related any of the above areas will be considered.