Renate Meyer (statistician)

Renate Meyer is a New Zealand statistician, and is a full professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in gravitational wave analysis.

Academic career
Meyer is a German-born New Zealander. She completed a PhD titled Invariante Präordnungen und algorithmische Aspekte bei Matrix-Approximationsproblemen in multivariaten statistischen Verfahren (Invariant preorders and algorithmic aspects of matrix approximation problems in multivariate statistical methods) at the RWTH Aachen University in 1993. Having visited New Zealand for two international meetings, the 1992 International Biometrics Conference at the University of Waikato and the International Workshop on Matrix Methods in Statistics at the University of Auckland, Meyer intended to stay for two years when she joined the faculty of the University of Auckland in 1994. Meyer was promoted to full professor in 2019.

Meyer is a pioneer in gravitational wave analysis, having got interested in the field through collaborator Nelson Christensen, who had been a doctoral student of Rainer Weiss. She is part of a New Zealand team, the NZ Astrostatistics and General Relativity Group, which is a formal working group of the LISA Consortium to observe gravitational waves in space. Meyer's students have worked in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Albert Einstein Institute in Hanover, Germany, the University of Edinburgh, and the Institute of Space Technology in Pakistan.

Awards and honours
Meyer was awarded a James Cook Research Fellowship in 2021 to work with LIGO and LISA researchers to "understand the sources of noise in gravitational wave detection and to mitigate against them to purify the desired wave signal".