News

Congratulations to our Statistics PhD student Joe Watson, who was awarded the Student Presentation Award at the virtual International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) 2020!

ISEC is a biennial meeting of researchers who bridge ecology and statistics and was hosted this year by UNSW Sydney (the University of New South Wales).

Our professor and department head, Paul Gustafson, has received this year’s Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) Gold Medal.

The Gold Medal is the SSC’s most prestigious award for research. It is awarded to “a person who has made outstanding contributions to statistics, or to probability, either to mathematical developments or in applied work” (Statistical Society of Canada).

Hearty congratulations to you, Paul!

UBC Statistics PhD student Evan Sidrow won the Best Graduate Oral Presentation Award (Ph.D.) at the Eighth Annual Canadian Statistics Student Conference. This conference is usually held in-person just before the annual Statistical Society of Canada meeting, but this May, it was offered online. Evan’s presentation, Modelling Marine Mammal Sub-dive Behaviour with Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models, stems from joint work with Sarah Fortune and Andrew Trites of the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries, and Marie Auger-Méthé and Nancy Heckman.

Our department is thrilled to be welcoming five new faculty colleagues: Vincenzo Coia, Melissa Lee, Rodolfo Lourenzutti, Daniel McDonald, and Yongjin Park.

Rodolfo, Melissa, and Vincenzo will be taking up Assistant Professor of Teaching positions on July 1.

On the same date, Daniel will be joining us in an Associate Professor position.

And Yongjin will begin his role as an Assistant Professor in a joint position between the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Department of Statistics on September 1.

We’re very pleased to announce that our Statistics Senior Instructor, Eugenia Yu, has won a Killam Teaching Prize for excellence in teaching.

We have all become familiar with the importance of monitoring the number of COVID-19 cases for setting policies and managing limited health care resources. But how do inaccuracies in tests for the virus impact the curves that describe the epidemic?

The Statistics Department is happy to announce that PhD student Sonja Isberg has been honoured in two ways for her contributions to statistics education.

Sonja is the recipient of the department’s Graduate Teaching Assistant Award and has also received a prestigious UBC Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, of which Sonja is one of only five recipients in the Faculty of Science.

We are pleased to announce that David Kepplinger has won the Department’s 2019–20 Data Science Award.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2019 Marshall Prize is PhD student Joe Watson.

The prize, which is awarded to a Statistics graduate student who has achieved great distinction, honours Professor Emeritus Albert Marshall for his scholarly contributions and his role in establishing the Department of Statistics at UBC.

Congratulations to our Professor Nancy Heckman on her role as the Associate Scientific Director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI). Nancy was appointed to this role in September 2019.