News

This year’s recipients of the Dr John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships are Huaiwen (Angela) Dong and Kenny Chiu.  

The Statistics Department offers several types of free statistical consultation, via SOS, STAT 551 and STAT 450/550, as follows.

Professors Natalia Nolde and Harry Joe (UBC-V Statistics) and John Braun (UBC-O Statistics) have received funding to help Scotiabank in its efforts to advance financial modelling to help manage risks and protect customers.

The Nash Medal this year is awarded to Janet Lam. Janet has completed a major in Statistics and a minor in Computer Science, and she will graduate this year with distinction. The majority of her grades have been in the 90s, and she has completed 4 Co-op work terms. Last year, Janet was awarded the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarship, and she has also received the Trek Excellence scholarship as well as scholarships from the Computer Science Department. 

Undergraduate Kris Hong and PhD student Guohai Zhou are the first recipients of the Rick White Award. This recently established award recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application. The award honours the memory of Rick White, who served the Department and the University with his gifts in Applied Statistics.  

The Greater Vancouver Regional Science Fair, held at UBC April 6 – 8, 2017, showcased amazing projects from students from many schools in the Lower Mainland. This year, we honoured these 3 teams of students with the 2017 UBC Statistics Award: 

Junior division 

“Qui le dit en premier” 

By Claudia Hill and Isabella Haas-Bardi from Alpha Secondary 

Read about their project:  http://bit.ly/2qoFhMa 

We are very proud of our PhD alumnus Andy Leung for having received the Pierre Robillard Award from the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC). This award recognizes “the best PhD thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university during the previous year”. Andy won this prize for his thesis “Robust Estimation and Inference under Cellwise and Casewise Contamination”, which was supervised by Professor Ruben Zamar.

We are pleased to announce that Fred (Hongyang) Zhang has won the Department’s 2016-17 Data Science Award.

Graduate Teaching Assistants are crucial to the Department’s teaching activities. Every year since 2011, we have recognized GTA excellence via the Statistics Department Graduate Teaching Award.

The recipient of this year’s Marshall Prize is Yang (Seagle) Liu.