Her research interests include longitudinal studies, survival analysis, spatiotemporal data, heart surgery, and wildfires.

[2] Dean was born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago in 1958 and moved to Canada when she was 19.

She did her graduate studies at the University of Waterloo, earning a master's degree in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1988,[1] supervised by Jerry Lawless.

[4] Her dissertation was Mixed Poisson Models and Regression Methods for Count Data.

[2] She became Burnaby Mountain Research Chair at Simon Fraser before moving to Western as dean of science in 2011.