News

Coming up in September, the Statistics Department will be hosting two lectures by van Eeden invited lecturer Professor Roger Cooke (Chauncey Starr Chair for Risk Analysis, Resources for the Future, USA; and Department of Mathematics, Technische Universiteit Delft, Netherlands).

The lectures will be on Tuesday, September 22nd and on Thursday, September 24th. There will be small receptions before each lecture in the lobby of the building where the lecture is being held. Lecture times, locations, and abstracts are below.

In 2014-15, the Statistics Department announced a new student award, in Data Science, and received many excellent nominations. 

This award's first recipient is Rosemary McCloskey, a Master’s student in Bioinformatics, in recognition of her contributions to a large-scale project on virus evolution at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

The Department of Statistics is soliciting nominations for the recently established Department of Statistics Award in Data Science, an award to recognize the importance of developing and applying tools to answer important questions through the analysis of data. This $1000 award is offered to an undergraduate or graduate student who has demonstrated initiative and creativity in making outstanding contributions in the field of Data Science.

On November 26, 2015, Statistics Professor Emeritus Jim Zidek gave an exciting seminar titled: "The long road to 0.075 ppm and beyond: The statistician’s perspective on the process for setting ozone standards".

In case you missed the lecture, you may watch a recording that PIMS made of it here.

Professor Ruben Zamar and Dr. Saber Miresmailli, founder and CEO of Ecoation Innovative Solution Inc. (EIS), have been awarded an NSERC Engage Grant to fund a joint research project, which includes funding for a four-month internship for Statistics PhD student Andy Leung. The project involves Dr. Miresmailli's cutting-edge research on automatic (robot) sensing of different chemicals released by plants in response to pest infections. Dr. Miresemailli anticipates that the commercial application of this technology will help farmers in BC and elsewhere.

Congratulations to Professor Alexandre Bouchard-Côté!

Professor Bouchard-Côté received this prestigious award for his excellence in work at the interface of probabilistic modeling, Monte Carlo inference, Bayesian statistics and machine learning and for his contributions to statistical and computational methods in phylogenetics and natural language processing.

Graduate Teaching Assistants play an important role in the department. Every year since 2011, we have recognized GTA excellence via the Statistics Department's Graduate Teaching Award.

Andy Leung has been awarded the Marshall Prize for 2015.

Andy is in the late stages of his PhD program, which is being supervised by Dr. Ruben Zamar. Andy already has two publications and an R package at CRAN. He has contributed a lot to the Department as graduate student representative and in the development of WebWork problems. He is also a past winner of a graduate TA award.

Congratulations, Andy!