scholarships

Scholarships

Sarah Chan and Lianjie (Marc) Shi Awarded a 2025 Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarship

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.

Modelling Complex Biologging Data with Hidden Markov Models

To join this seminar virtually: Please request Zoom connection details from ea@stat.ubc.ca.

Abstract: Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are commonly used to identify latent processes from observed time series, but it is challenging to fit them to large and complex time series collected by modern sensors. Using data from threatened resident killer whales (Orcinus orca) off the western coast of Canada as a case study, we provide solutions to three common challenges faced when identifying latent behaviour from complicated biologging data. First, biologging time series often violate common assumptions of HMMs when collected at high frequencies. We thus propose a hierarchical approach which utilizes moving-window Fourier analysis to capture fine-scale dependence structures. Second, modern technology allows researchers to directly label the latent process of interest, but rare labels can have a negligible influence on parameter estimates. We introduce a weighted likelihood approach that increases the relative influence of labelled observations. Third, applying HMMs to large time series is computationally demanding, so we propose a novel EM algorithm that combines a partial E step with variance-reduced stochastic optimization within the M step. These solutions allow researchers to model biologging data with HMMs that are more interpretable, accurate, and efficient to fit than existing methods.

Recipients of the 2024 Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarship

This year’s recipients of the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships are Jessie Liang and Jade Bouchard!

Jessie Liang is a third-year Statistics major student, excelling in her academic performance and having received multiple scholarships, including Outstanding International Student Award in 2022 and J. Fred Muir Memorial Scholarship in Science in 2023. Jessie completed four courses in the summer of 2023 to fulfill the pre-requisites for Statistics 3^rd year courses. During the 2023-24 academic year, she took six courses in both Term 1 and 2. By the end of her second year at UBC, she had successfully completed the core requirements for her third year. Her grades are consistently excellent, with nearly all A+ grades.

Jade Bouchard, a fourth-year Statistics major, is in the co-op program and has finished most of her 4^th year STAT requirements with grades that are almost uniformly A+. During her co-op terms at STEMCELL Technologies as a Pricing Operations Intern and at Borealis AI (RBC) as a Machine Learning Software Engineering Intern, she gained valuable experience in building scalable data pipelines. Jade looks forward to returning to RBC in 2025 as a Machine Learning Engineer.

About the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships

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 his 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.