Jodie Wallis (BMath ’93) is always in pursuit of the most efficient way to get something done. “Sometimes my partner will tell me to stop optimizing him when I point out small ways to save time and effort,” she laughed.
University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Mathematics master’s student, Luke Hagar, is among the 25 finalists in this year’s GRADflix competition.
Hagar’s project, entitled “Beyond p-values: Sample size determination using Bayesian statistics,” will be shown along with the other finalists in the showcase event on Friday, January 29, 2021, where the winners will be announced.
“Math and medicine are like the two solitudes,” reflected Professor Siv Sivaloganathan, chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics. “They represent two separate cultures and ways of thinking.” When the two combine into mathematical medicine, the results are nothing short of astonishing.
In 1988, Sivaloganathan was a newly minted professor at the University of Alberta.
Two years into his undergraduate degree at Sichuan University, Chao Qian regretted his decision to study business management. “I came to the realization that management skills are better learned outside of the classroom,” he said. “I wanted to learn something more solid and quantitative. That’s where my journey to Waterloo began.”
A year into his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo’s School of Accounting and Finance, Jonathan Lucki felt pulled in an unexpected direction. “My whole life, I had plans to be an accountant,” he remembered. "I ended up enrolling in the Math/Business Accounting program within the Faculty of Mathematics. But even before university, math had become my favourite subject in school and I found myself writing computer programs in my spare time for fun."
Like thousands of other business leaders across Canada, Alex Hoff (BMath ’04) reckoned with the harsh financial reality of a global pandemic at the beginning of 2020. “As a leadership team, we had to scale back and make tough hiring decisions once we realized that we couldn’t grow as quickly as anticipated,” he shared.
Jinjiang ‘J.J.’ Lian first realized he wanted to become a data scientist while working as a data manager for clinical research at a university healthcare facility in the US. “I noticed that many healthcare workers lacked the skill set to collect and interpret patient data correctly, which negatively impacted patient care,” he recalls. “I decided that whether I ended up in healthcare, tech, or another industry altogether, I wanted to use my data skills to help people.”
Professor Mei Nagappan spends most of his time following digital footprints to see where they lead. “The goal of our research is to make the life of a software engineer slightly easier tomorrow than it is today,” he explained.
She grew up in Alberta and Nova Scotia, but she considers Nanchang, China, her second home. After earning undergraduate degrees in pure mathematics and education, Alyssa Schultz Dey took a leap of faith and accepted a teaching position at the Nanchang No. 2 High School Sino-Canadian Nova Scotia International Program in southeastern China.
The University of Waterloo was Anita Chen’s second choice. In hindsight, she is “absolutely grateful” for the turn of events that led her from China to the Faculty of Mathematics.