# Welcome to the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is among the top academic units for statistical and actuarial science in the world and is home to more than 40 research active full-time faculty working in diverse and exciting areas. The Department is also home to over 900 undergraduate students and about 150 graduate students in programs including Actuarial Science, Biostatistics, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, and Statistics-Computing.

We are located on University of Waterloo main campus, which is located at the heart of Canada's Technology Triangle about 100 kilometers west of Toronto.

1. May 23, 2017DataFest celebrates going beyond the numbers

From May 5 to 7, over 70 students from across campus participated in the first annual ASA DataFest competition hosted by the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. The main goal of the competition is to have students collaborate and compete on a data analysis question that was provided by Expedia.com for 2017.

After intense data wrangling, analysis, and presentation design three teams took away the top prize for Best Insight, Best Visualization, and Best use of External Data.

2. May 18, 2017First annual Datathon at the University of Waterloo

Over 550 Waterloo students applied for 100 spots at the first annual Waterloo Datathon (May 13th).  Like a Hackathon, students were given a set of materials and asked to solve a structured problem.  It involved working with a dataset, predictive modeling, interpretation and presentation of results.  This event sponsored by Citadel and powered by Correlation One in partnership with the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science awarded a top prize of $20,000 and second prize of$5,000 to the top two winning teams.

3. May 11, 2017Distinguished Lecture will be given by Professor Peter Diggle, Lancaster University on May 11, 2017

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is pleased to announce that the first lecture in 2017 for the David Sprott Distinguished Lecture Series will be given by Professor Peter Diggle from Lancaster University on Thursday May 11, 2017 at 4 pm.

## Gord Willmot

Professor

​Munich Re Chair in Insurance

Contact Information:
Gord Willmot

Research interests

Professor Willmot's research interests involve the analysis of insurance losses, with particular emphasis on the theory and application of aggregate claims models and models for the insurer's surplus associated with a particular block of insurance business. His main approaches to the study of these models involves a variety of analytical tools, including those from applied probability and mathematical reliability theory.