Congratulations to Mario Ghossoub and Gautam Kamath, this year’s recipients of the Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award.
Mario Ghossoub is an associate professor of Statistics and Actuarial Science, as well as a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Analyst. His research concerns the optimal design of risk-sharing arrangements, including both insurance markets (between policyholders and insurance companies) and decentralized risk-sharing markets (directly between economic agents without a centralized insurance provider).
“Dr. Ghossoub has established himself as one of the leaders of the next generation of actuarial scientists,” says Changbao Wu, chair of the department of Statistics and Actuarial Science.
“It is always a nice surprise to receive recognition for the hard work that my research team and I have been dedicated to in the past several years,” Ghossoub says. “This award will only serve as a motivation to continue on our trajectory, in the hope of making a concrete impact on the lives of Canadians through a better and more efficient design of mutualized risk-sharing platforms and community-based risk-sharing infrastructure.”
Ghossoub has been a professor at Waterloo since 2017. His appointment to faculty in Math is something of a homecoming: he graduated from Waterloo’s PhD program in Actuarial Science in 2011.
“I am grateful to my colleagues and students for always reminding me why I love doing what I do!” he says. “I am equally grateful to my department chair and associate chair of research for their continued support, and for providing me with an outstanding research environment.”
Gautam Kamath is an associate professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, which he joined in 2019. His research focuses on differential privacy, machine learning, and statistics, and he leads a research group of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates called The Salon. Earlier this year he was named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Vector Institute Faculty Member in recognition of his research contributions.
“Congratulations to Gautam Kamath on receiving this much-deserved research excellence award,” said Raouf Boutaba, professor and director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science.
“Guatam’s research is grounded strongly in theoretical computer science, but he and his students ensure that the work they conduct also has critically important practical applications, most notably by drawing useful insights from data while preserving privacy of sensitive personal information.”
The Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award provides $2,500 to one or two early or mid-career faculty in the Faculty of Mathematics, in recognition of “the outstanding research contributions of our colleagues.” It was established in 2017, the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Faculty of Mathematics, and as of this year has been given to sixteen recipients. You can learn more about the award, and past winners, on the Internal Awards and Opportunities website.