UBC Statistics is launching a new Department Colloquium Series! These talks will be broad, accessible, and engaging — all are welcome!

Our inaugural talk will take place on Monday, March 16th. We’re excited to launch this new series by welcoming Dr. David Haziza, Professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Ottawa.

Date: Monday, March 16, 2026
Time: 3 - 4 PM
Location: ESB 5104/5106

Title: A Debiased Machine Learning Single-Imputation Framework for Item Nonresponse in Surveys

Abstract: Machine learning methods are now increasingly studied and used in National Statistical Offices, in particular to handle item nonresponse, where some survey respondents answer certain questions but leave others missing. In most surveys, item nonresponse affects key study variables, and imputation is routinely used to handle the resulting missing data. Standard parametric imputation methods can support rigorous inference when their modeling assumptions are approximately correct. However, when the imputation model is misspecified, the resulting inferences may be potentially misleading. Machine learning offers a flexible alternative by learning complex relationships between variables from the data, which can reduce the risk of misspecification. At the same time, this flexibility introduces new challenges for survey inference, since modern learning algorithms may converge more slowly than classical parametric models and may not automatically deliver valid uncertainty quantification. In this talk, I will present a survey sampling extension of the double/debiased machine learning framework of Chernozhukov et al. (2018). The proposed approach combines machine learning-based imputation with design-based survey weighting and an orthogonalized estimating strategy, leading to root-$n$ consistent and asymptotically normal estimation of population means under realistic conditions. We also develop a consistent variance estimator, yielding asymptotically valid confidence intervals while allowing the use of a wide range of machine learning algorithms. I will briefly discuss aggregation procedures and conclude with simulation results illustrating the performance of the proposed methodology.  

This colloquium series is sponsored in part by the Constance van Eeden Endowment.

Future talks in this colloquium series:

Tuesday, April 21
Speaker: Dr. Edward Kennedy (Carnegie Mellon University)
Time: 11 AM–12 PM
Location: ESB 5104/5106

Monday, June 8
Speaker: Dr. Stephanie Hicks (Johns Hopkins University)
Time: 3–4 PM
Location: ESB 5104/5106

Join us for the 3rd Annual UBC Life Sciences Symposium!

On Friday, April 10th, join 400+ researchers for a day of student talks, professional development workshops, and an EDI panel. The event is free for all UBC students and staff, and food will be provided all day!

Register or submit an abstract here: https://lss.lsi.ubc.ca/

Poster/Talk Deadline: March 20th
General Registration: April 3rd

Schedule:

9 am to 10 am: Faculty talk: Dr. Miller
10 am to 11 am: Session 1 (student talks)
11 am to 12 pm: Equity, diversity, inclusion panel
12 pm to 1 pm: Lunch break
1 pm to 2 pm: Session 2 (student talks)
2 pm to 3 pm: Professional development workshops
3 pm to 4 pm: Keynote speaker: Dr. Shendure
4 pm to 6 pm: Poster mixer, sponsor booths, award ceremony

Speakers: 

UBC Faculty Speaker: Dr. Freda Miller, Deputy Director, UBC Michael Smith Labs; Professor, Medical Genetics & SBME
Title: Repair and Regeneration of Mammalian Tissues via Endogenous Stem Cells.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Jay Shendure, Professor, Genome Sciences, University of Washington
Title: Molecular recording of mammalian development.
Abstract: Biology unfolds over time, within cells and tissues that are opaque to our eyes and instruments. Current molecular measurement paradigms are inherently limited: genomics is destructive and static, and imaging confined to a few channels in visually accessible systems. I will describe our efforts to develop an alternative—molecular recording—in which cells are programmed to write their own histories from within. I will focus on DNA Typewriter and ENGRAM, which record lineage and cellular state information into genomic DNA. Our long-term goal is to reframe phenotyping as an organism-wide, time-resolved measurement, capturing developmental statistics rather than static or tissue-restricted endpoints.

Workshops:

Session A: Science Outreach and Community Engagment
Session B: Hands-On Statistics with the Department of Statistics, facilitated by Grace Tompkins, Assistant Professor of Teaching, UBC Statistics

Register

Dr. Marie Auger-Méthé is the recipient of one of six UBC Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships which are provided annually from the Killam endowment established through a bequest from the late Dorothy J. Killam. The Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships (KARF) are designed to empower early‑career scholars who have already demonstrated notable impact in their fields and are poised to advance to the next stage of their research careers, providing research funding and valuable time to devote to their work.

Dr. Auger-Méthé is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). She also holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Statistical Ecology and is a leading figure in the investigation of animal movement. Dr. Auger-Méthé is internationally known for developing data analysis tools used by research ecologists to better understand animal behaviour and by government agencies to guide concrete management decisions, and she has collaborated with Indigenous hunters to meaningfully integrate Indigenous knowledge into statistical analysis. Her research output includes papers in ecological and statistics journals, and accompanying R packages.  Her publication record—over 60 peer-reviewed papers as an associate professor—is exceptional and more typical of a full professor in the discipline.

Dr. Auger-Méthé has developed state space and hierarchical models to better capture the complexity of animal movement, yet still maintain interpretability. Her highly cited first-authored 2021 Ecological Monographs paper showcases her expertise in applications of state-space modelling to ecological time series and her ability to communicate complex technical information to ecologists. Her contributions to Hidden Markov Models include accounting for the fine-scale dependence and multiscale structure associated with high-frequency data, providing accurate classification with sparse labels, speeding up fitting algorithms, and automatically selecting the number of hidden states. In a series of papers, she has incorporated Indigenous knowledge into statistical analyses to understand seal behaviour and habitat use.  She has also used citizen science from whale-watching, accounting for the spatially-biased search effort present in such opportunistic datasets.

This fellowship will allow Dr. Auger- Méthé to develop data-based methods and resources to guide decisions to identify critical habitat. The work will build on her research in hierarchical models and in combining different forms of data, including citizen science data and Indigenous Knowledge. Through this work, she will create easy-to-use tools that identify Critical Habitats quickly and accurately and which will facilitate the protection of such habitats via governmental policies (e.g., recovery strategies and marine protected areas). She will also create an open-access repository of Critical Habitat information that can be used by NGOs, First Nations, and other groups when advocating for the protection of imperilled species. Such work is urgently needed to address biodiversity loss and generate systematic ways of meeting Canada’s conservation goals. To demonstrate the usefulness of these tools, she will apply them to marine mammals and seabirds data in areas with increasing shipping and energy developments.

Congratulations, Dr. Auger-Méthé!

The UBC Department of Statistics congratulates Kevin Lin, Director of Finance, HR, and Operations, on being awarded a 2025 Faculty of Science Excellence in Service Award. 

This award recognizes staff and faculty who have made exceptional contributions beyond their regular responsibilities, advancing the mission and strategic goals of UBC Science through their dedication, service, and impact. 

Kevin has been recognized for his "service and leadership infused with creativity, diligence, empathy, humility, integrity, and intelligence".

Congratulations, Kevin!

Read more about the UBC Faculty of Science Excellence in Service Award.

UBC Statistics Professor Daniel McDonald and Assistant Professor Charles Margossian joined The Early Edition’s Associate Producer, Laurence Watt, to discuss the chances of the U.S. national team playing in Vancouver during the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer.

Beginning February 1, 2026, Dr. Yan Song joins the UBC Statistics Department.

Dr. Song, who joins us as an assistant professor, brings a wealth of expertise in spatio-temporal statistics and nonparametric methods with a strong focus on climate science and high-performance computing. She earned her Ph.D. from Renmin University of China and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Yan’s innovative research will significantly advance Canada's capabilities in environmental sciences and foster new collaborations. We're also thrilled about her commitment to mentoring our students, helping to develop the next generation of data and environmental scientists.

Dr. Song shared her excitement, saying, "I'm especially excited about joining UBC Statistics to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines, work with talented students, and contribute to the department's strong research community."

Welcome, Yan! We can't wait to see the incredible work you'll do here.

Congratulations to UBC Statistics Assistant Professor Geoff Pleiss, who has been awarded a 2025 Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award.

This award, presented to six winners every year, recognizes outstanding junior Bayesian research.

As a Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award recipient, Geoff will present his work in the Junior Bayes Beyond the Borders (JB^3) webinar series.

Congratulations Geoff!

Congratulations to Xiaoting Li, who has been awarded the Lorraine Schwartz Prize for the 2024-25 academic year. The award is given annually by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics for distinctions in the fields of statistics and probability. 

Xiaoting recently defended her Ph.D. thesis in Statistics, supervised by Professor Harry Joe. Her thesis work on multivariate tail inference and extremes, plus other research during her Master's at McGill led to publications in the journals Entropy, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Environmetrics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association.  Her important applications of statistics and probability have included systemic risk for financial institutions, extreme flood insurance losses, and other areas. Xiaoting also had valuable roles at UBC as instructor of a course and in service roles.  She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Manitoba.

The prize was established in 1966 in memory of Dr. Lorraine Schwartz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1960-1965, by her friends and colleagues.  Dr. Schwartz received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, working with Professor Lucien Le Cam, with a thesis entitled "Consistency of Bayes' Procedures".   She then took a position at UBC where she remained until her untimely death.  However even in her brief career, she made seminal contributions to her field in published research papers that are still cited today.

For more details about the Lorraine Schwartz Prize, please see https://www.stat.ubc.ca/lorraine-schwartz-prize.

The UBC Statistics Department proudly announces that Assistant Professor Keegan Korthauer has been named a recipient of a 2025 Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Award.

The Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Program is designed to support early-career researchers in establishing their independent careers, building research teams, and developing innovative programs that drive cutting-edge health solutions.

Dr. Korthauer's research group is tackling the complex challenge of extracting meaningful biological insights from massive-scale genomic experiments. Her team develops rigorous statistical frameworks and computational tools to leverage the vast scope and scale of high-throughput sequencing data. This work is critical to uncovering new molecular signals associated with major health issues, including cancer, child health, and development.

About Michael Smith Health Research BC
Michael Smith Health Research BC is the province's health research funding agency. It is dedicated to supporting the best health research, researchers, and research talent to improve health and health care.

Fanny Dupont and Rachel Lobay have been awarded the 2024-2025 Rick White Award.

The Rick White Award was established in 2017 to recognize undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a statistics program who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application.

Fanny Dupont is supervised by Professor Marie Auger-Methe and has collaborated extensively with ecologists. She is part of a CANSSI collaborative research team that brings together researchers across the fields of statistics, ecology, and medicine to develop statistical models, specifically hidden Markov Models (HMMs), for biologging data. Fanny is the lead author of a paper published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution and has given workshops on hidden Markov models.

Rachel Lobay is supervised by Professor Daniel McDonald and has been working with Delphi Research Group to develop the theory and practice of epidemic detection, tracking, and forecasting. Her contributions include a lead-authored paper in Epidemics and work on two R packages, epiprocess and epipredict. She also co-instructed a workshop on "Epidemic Modelling and Forecasting." 

Congratulations to you both!