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Friday, December 18, 2020

Driving social impact

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.”

Friday, November 6, 2020

Learning to teach

Hayley Reid almost attended another university. “I was leaning in a different direction, but Waterloo Math blew me away on Visitation Day,” she remembers. “There was a real sense of community, which was a key factor for me.” Hayley also had the opportunity to meet Dr. David McKinnon, her future PhD supervisor who introduced her to an area of research that blends geometry with number theory. “It was my first exposure to the field, and I was sold,” she says. She committed to a master’s degree in pure mathematics and never looked back.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Free to explore

James Petrie places a high premium on intellectual freedom. After graduating with a degree in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia (UBC), he accepted a position as a firmware engineer for a leading multinational technology company. “A few months in, I realized I was missing the opportunity to view problems through a wider lens and pursue the things that interested me most,” he remembers.

James Petrie on a dock with mountains in the background

Monday, August 24, 2020

Striking a balance

Not long after beginning his graduate program at Waterloo, Matthew Sullivan discovered a passion for Ultimate Frisbee. Today, he serves as the chief of the Ultimate Frisbee intramural program while continuing to referee and play as often as he can. Close to 450 students sign up to play every autumn. “Things like age, gender, or program don’t matter out there,” says Matthew. “Any student can go out and play. Like all the intramural sports at Waterloo, Ultimate provides a great way to de-stress, stay in shape, and balance the academic with the social.”

Friday, July 24, 2020

Rising to the challenge

Irene Melgarejo Lermas has never been one to shy away from a challenge. At the recommendation of a friend who studied at Waterloo, she moved from her native Spain to study quantum field theory at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC). In addition to tackling a complex subject in her second language, she was assigned to teach a class of 200 undergraduate students during her first semester. “I didn’t have any teaching experience at the time,” she remembers.

Shixiao Zhang is this year’s winner of the Pierre Robillard Award of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) which recognizes the best PhD thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university in a given year. His thesis, entitled “Multiply Robust Empirical Likelihood Inference for Missing Data and Causal Inference Problems," was written while Shixiao was a doctoral student in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at University of Waterloo under the supervision of Dr.

Recent PhD graduates, Tom Kelly (Combinatorics and Optimization) and Priyank Jaini (Computer Science), have been awarded the Faculty of Mathematics Doctoral Prize. Now in its second year, these prizes are awarded annually to recognize the achievements of top graduating doctoral students in the Faculty of Mathematics.

For two graduate students at Waterloo, unraveling the mysteries of the human genome requires more than just science. These two students, both given a departmental research presentation award by the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, are passionate about bringing their skills to the field of biostatistics.

Learn more about the research of Qihuang Zhang and Ce Yang.

The Faculty of Mathematics celebrates the outstanding achievements of Yinan Li and Yilin Chen, the two recipients of the 2020 Huawei Prize for Best Research Paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student. Both students published research papers that advance their field of study with an innovative approach to a complex problem.