The fifth annual Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research has been awarded to graduating student Jimmy He.
Jimmy was nominated by Professor Kathryn Hare, with whom he worked as an undergraduate research assistant. He is completing a Bachelor of Mathematics degree, majoring in Pure Mathematics and Statistics.
"He has an extraordinary ability for finding deep results in the literature, understanding their subtleties, and applying them in creative ways," says Prof. Hare of Jimmy He. They have co-authored papers from two projects:
- The absolute continuity of convolution products of orbital measures in exceptional symmetric spaces, submitted to Monatsh. fur Math. (2015).
- Smoothness of convolution products of orbital measures on rank one compact symmetric spaces, accepted to Bulletin of the Aust. Math. Soc. (2015)
A strong nomination in support of Ahmad Radaideh was also put forward for this year's Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.
About the Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research
Professor Ming Li and his family have created this award in honour and memory of his late wife, Jessie Wenhui Zou.
Jessie was born August 27, 1968 in Wuhan, China. She received a PhD degree from Wuhan University in physics when she was 26 years old. Jessie loved the field of finance and continued to pursue her studies and graduated from the University of Waterloo’s statistical finance master’s program in 2000. During this time, she also studied computer science at Waterloo and took a course in Java programming (CS 134). Upon graduation, she worked at the Bank of Montreal, specializing in risk control management.
With this award, the family wishes to support research activities at the undergraduate level within the Faculty of Mathematics to carry on Jessie’s passion for education.
The Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research is valued at $1,000 and presented annually to an undergraduate student enrolled in his or her final year of any program within the Faculty of Mathematics. Students must have demonstrated excellence in research and have been nominated by a faculty member who has supervised that research. The awardee is chosen by the Faculty of Mathematics Research Advisory Committee, chaired by the associate dean, research.
See past awardees and nominees: