Mary E. Thompson is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Waterloo, where she has been a member of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science since 1969. Her areas of interest include statistical estimation theory, inference for stochastic processes, biostatistics and survey methods. She served as Scientific Director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute from 2012 to 2015, and as Associate Director for Ontario from 2015 to 2018.