Hastings was a student at U Toronto where his PhD (1962) was supervised by Geoffrey Watson. After two years at U Canterbury in New Zealand, and two at Bell Labs, he returned in 1966 to U Toronto where he wrote the paper (in Biometrika) that placed an algorithm due to Metropolis in a statistical context (see Markov chain Monte Carlo methods). In 1971 he moved to U Victoria, BC.

http://www.zoominfo.com/p/W.K.-Hastings/1017037726 Biographical memoir.