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This week, the University of Waterloo campus will host the second-ever CANSSI-NISS Health Data Science Workshop, taking place from August 3rd to 4th. This workshop is jointly sponsored by the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI) and the United States' National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).

When Sacha Tihanyi was halfway through an undergraduate economics degree, he recognized a budding passion for mathematics. “I had many broad interests in school, but something flipped for me during that program,” he remembered. “I chose Waterloo because it had a reputation as the best mathematics school in Canada.”

As a master’s student, Chris Salahub completed a project focused on reducing the risk for cyclists on the busy streets of Zurich. His passion for leveraging data to solve real-world problems is what drew him back to the Faculty of Mathematics, where he previously earned a bachelor’s degree, to pursue a PhD in statistics.

“I like to think I’m a curious person,” said Jennifer Haid (BMath’04), a native of the Waterloo Region. When she learned about Waterloo’s Math Day from her high school math teacher, she decided to attend in hopes of learning about a career path that would leverage her aptitude for mathematics in the business world. “I remember watching a professor deliver a presentation about actuarial science and thinking two things: It was challenging, and I could do it,” she shared. 

Katia Naccarato has never shied away from exploring an unfamiliar path, hitting a dead end, and trying a different one. Before she enrolled in the Master of Actuarial Science (MActSc) program at the Faculty of Mathematics, she was laser-focused on pursuing a career in medicine. Her current trajectory looks nothing like she expected, but she’s confident she’s heading in the right direction.

Samantha Wallis’s enthusiasm for statistics is matched only by her longtime passion for visual arts. As she considers her path forward after graduating with a degree in mathematics, Wallis thinks about how to meld her two interests into a single career. While she hasn’t landed on a definitive answer, she has a strong hunch where she will go next.

Statistics and Actuarial Science PhD candidate Yilin Chen is one of two students to claim the 2020 Huawei Prize for Best Research paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student. The $4,000 prize affirms the value of Chen’s efforts to establish a framework for analyzing nonprobability survey samples in her winning paper: Doubly Robust Interference with Nonprobability Survey Samples.

Statistics and Actuarial Science PhD candidate Rui Qiao was one of the six students who won the 2019 Huawei Prize for Best Research Paper by a Mathematics Graduate Student. This award recognizes the impact of his Deep learning enables de novo peptide sequencing from data-independent-acquisition mass spectrometry with a prize of $4,000.