in 1958, and his Ph.D. in 1962, both from the University of Toronto's department of mathematics (which included statistics at that time).
After completing his Ph.D., Hastings worked briefly at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (1962–64), and at Bell Labs in New Jersey (1964–66).
During this period, he wrote his famous paper on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling.
[4] While at the University of Toronto, Hastings also supervised his one Ph.D. student, Peter Peskun (now at York University), whose 1970 dissertation "The Choice Of Transition Matrix In Monte Carlo Sampling Methods Using Markov Chains" developed the Peskun ordering on Markov chain kernels.
In 1971, Hastings joined the department of mathematics at the University of Victoria (in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada) as an associate professor, and was granted tenure there in 1974.