Statistical consulting and research design services at York were initially organized in 1968 within the Institute for Social Research (ISR; originally called the Institute for Behavioural Research). In 1983, a group including John Fox, Gene Denzel, and Michael Friendly, applied for a one-year NSERC Infrastructure Grant to expand this service, creating the Statistical Consulting Service (SCS) within ISR. SCS was funded by NSERC until 1996, when the Infrastructure Grant programme was terminated. SCS was then reorganized within the Faculty of Arts and the Institute for Social Research so as to continue without external funding. Today, SCS is a pan university entity with faculty, staff and students from the Institute for Social Research, Faculty of Health and Faculty of Science.
In 2004, John Fox (a longtime member of SCS) wrote a history of SCS from 1983 to 2004. The article, from the Statistical Society of Canada’s newsletter, can be found here.
