News archive - 2022

Monday, September 19, 2022

Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is pleased to welcome Mikko Pakkanen as an Associate Professor

PAKKANEN, Mikko (MSc (Mathematics), 2006, University of Helsinki; PhD (Applied Mathematics), 2010, University of Helsinki) will be joining the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science on September 19, 2022 as an Associate Professor. Before coming to Waterloo, Mikko held academic appointments at Imperial College London, most recently as a Senior Lecturer. At Imperial, he served also as Co-Director of the MSc in Mathematics and Finance and as Co-Director of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training in Financial Computing & Analytics. Mikko's research is focused on data science, stochastic processes, and quantitative finance. His specific research interests include statistical modeling of high frequency financial data, volatility modeling, limit theorems for stochastic processes, and machine learning in finance. Apart from financial applications, Mikko has recently started working on stochastic modeling in epidemiology and is keen to expand his research activity in this area.

Monday, August 29, 2022

Fangya Mao awarded Student Conference Award at the 43rd Meeting of the International Society of Clinical Biostatistics

Congratulations Dr. Fangya Mao for being recognized with a Student Conference Award at the 43rd Meeting of the International Society of Clinical Biostatistics Meeting in Newcastle, UK. Fangya's presentation on Spatial Dependence Modeling of Latent Susceptibility and Time to Joint Damage in Psoriatic Arthritis on August 23rd involved the use of mixture models for fitting clustered failure time processes under intermittent observation. Fangya completed her doctoral program in the spring of 2022 under the supervision of Richard Cook. In September she starts a Research Fellowship at the Biostatistics Branch of the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Learn more about the ISCB on their website.

Thursday, August 25, 2022

Math Alum Joy Jiang receives 40 under 40 Public Health Catalyst Award

Mathematics Statistics alumni Joy Jiang (PhD ‘18) has been named as one of the inaugural 40 Under 40 Public Health Catalyst Award recipients. The Boston Congress of Public Health recognized these 40 individuals as representatives of the next generation of leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers, scientists, activists, intellectual provocateurs, authors, and directors who inspire and catalyze a more just and equitable world.

Jiang was excited to be recognized, saying, “I’m extremely honoured to have received the award this year. This is a huge recognition for my work on bridging statistical methods with breast cancer research and big support to advancing method developments in women’s health. I look forward to leveraging this platform to develop and disseminate innovative and rigorous statistical methods leading to new pathways that can be targeted in breast cancer prevention and intervention trials to expand capacity for precision prevention.”

Learn more on the Math Faculty website.

Friday, August 5, 2022

Nathaniel Stevens and Mohammad Kohandel named winners of Faculty of Mathematics 2022 Awards for Distinction in Teaching

Nathaniel Stevens from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and Mohammad Kohandel from the Department of Applied Mathematics have been named winners of this year’s Awards for Distinction in Teaching from the Faculty of Mathematics.

The annual teaching award goes to faculty members who have consistently demonstrated outstanding pedagogical skills and a deep commitment to students. The winners are honoured by a public citation along with a cash prize.

Learn more about this award on the Math Faculty website.

Monday, August 1, 2022

Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is pleased to welcome Lisa Gao as an Assistant Professor

GAO, Lisa (BMath (Actuarial Science, Statistics), 2016, University of Waterloo; PhD (Actuarial Science, Risk Management, and Insurance), 2022, University of Wisconsin-Madison), will be joining the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science on August 1, 2022 as an Assistant Professor. Lisa's research interests are in non-life insurance analytics problems involving predictive and dependence modeling. Her current work focuses on spatiotemporal modeling of insurance claims arising from weather-related property damage. As technological advances increase the availability and granularity of data, Lisa's research highlights the potential for analytics to support key operational areas in non-life insurance.