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.
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."
UBC Statistics is proud to announce that Sarah Chan and Lianjie (Marc) Shi have been awarded a prestigious Dr. John and Barbara Petkau scholarship, recognizing their outstanding academic achievements and dedication.
In 2016, John and Barbara Petkau endowed two scholarships to recognize the academic merit of the next generation of statisticians and the impact these statisticians will have on solving world problems. One scholarship is for a student entering third year, and the other is for a student entering fourth year.
Third-year student Sarah Chan is in the combined major computer science and statistics specialization. She has consistently earned high grades in her core courses and is already tackling fourth-year material!
Lianjie (Marc) Shi is a fourth-year double major in psychology and statistics with an outstanding academic record, earning A+ in all of his statistics courses and nearly all of his mathematics courses. He is a two-time Dean’s Scholar honoree (2023, 2024) and recipient of several scholarships, including the Work Learn International Undergraduate Research Award (WLIURA) and the Faculty of Arts International Student Scholarship. Since 2024, Marc has been a research assistant in UBC’s Psychometric Lab (SEM Lab), where he completed an independent project on CFA models for Likert scales and developed an R Shiny application to assess multi-group measurement invariance.
Congratulations Sarah and Lianjie!
John Petkau, a professor emeritus in the department, has contributed in many ways to the department and the discipline with his vision and leadership, statistical expertise, generosity of time, and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. John’s wife, Barbara, deserves special thanks for generously sharing John's time with us.
See a list of previous recipients of the scholarships here.
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Saifuddin Syed will be joining the UBC Statistics Department as an Assistant Professor on September 1, 2025. Dr. Syed will be primarily focusing on the AIM-SI cluster, bringing his exceptional expertise to our faculty.
Saifuddin is no stranger to UBC, having completed both his M.Sc. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Statistics here. Following his doctoral studies, he held prestigious postdoctoral and research staff positions at the University of Oxford, further solidifying his impressive academic background.
His research is at the forefront of statistical innovation, centering on the development of robust and scalable algorithms for statistical inference and generative modeling. Dr. Syed’s work has a strong emphasis on scientific applications, making his contributions invaluable to a wide array of fields.
Saifuddin’s outstanding contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous accolades, including the Pierre Robillard Award, the Cecil Graham Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an Honourable Mention for the Savage Award in Bayesian theory and methods. These national and international honours highlight his significant impact and the high regard in which his work is held within the statistical community.
We eagerly anticipate Dr. Syed’s arrival and the profound impact his research, teaching, and mentorship will have on our department and students. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Saif!
The School of Mathematics and Statistics at Yunnan University hosted the Symposium on Foundations for Statistical Science on July 25–26, 2025, in Kunming, China, to honour the remarkable career of Professor Jiahua Chen on the occasion of his 65th birthday.
Professor Chen, who was a former guest professor at Yunnan University, was celebrated for his profound contributions to statistical science. The symposium brought together leading researchers and scholars from around the world to explore foundational topics in statistics.
The scientific program featured keynote and invited talks covering a wide range of topics on foundations for statistical science, including areas for which Professor Chen has made fundamental research contributions, such as finite mixture models, Bayesian information theory, experimental design, and survey sampling.
The conference was also an appreciation of Professor Chen’s service to the statistics profession, including the roles of Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Journal of Statistics and the 2005 President of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA).
UBC Statistics welcomes Charles Margossian as an Assistant Professor, beginning August 1, 2025.
Charles received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Columbia University in 2022 and brings three years of research experience as a Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute. His research broadly focuses on Bayesian modeling and probabilistic machine learning. This work bridges theory, computation, and application through the development of probabilistic programming languages, such as Stan.
Charles has published extensively in the areas of Bayesian computation and analysis, demonstrating both depth and breadth in his scholarship. He has also had fruitful collaborations in the sciences and has published in the areas of medicine, public health, and astrophysics. In addition to his research contributions, he brings teaching experience, particularly in short-course format, and has taught tutorials at a dozen conferences and summer schools. He is also a driving force behind several open-source software packages, underscoring his commitment to building accessible and impactful tools for the broader statistical and data science community.
In a statement published on Charles' website, he shared, "It is a considerable honour to receive a professorship at UBC, and it is a position I approach with optimism, awe, and gravity."
UBC Statistics extends a warm welcome to Grace Tompkins who joins our department as an Assistant Professor of Teaching!
Grace comes to us with an impressive background, having earned her Ph.D. in Statistics with a specialization in Biostatistics from the University of Waterloo in 2025. She's not just an expert in her field; she brings valuable experience in teaching assistant (TA) training, along with a strong commitment to mentorship and community building.
Her research interests are fascinating, focusing on irregular longitudinal data and causal inference, particularly weighting methods to account for biases. During her graduate studies, Grace was a graduate consultant at the Statistical Consulting and Collaborative Research Unit and an active member of the Health Data Science Lab at the University of Waterloo. This diverse experience means she's perfectly poised to teach both traditional statistical methodologies and emerging topics in data science.
Grace is incredibly enthusiastic about her new role at UBC. She shared:
"I feel so grateful to be in a position where I can positively impact statistics and data science education. I look forward to connecting with undergraduate and graduate students, and making statistical education more fun and accessible at UBC with my unique approach to teaching!"
We are excited to see the positive impact she'll have on our students and the broader community.
The New Investigator Presentation Award is presented annually by the SSC to recognize outstanding contributed talks, judged on the quality of both the presentation and the underlying research. Katie received the award for her talk titled “Authentic Data Science Assessments in a Computer-Based Testing Environment.”
