News

We are very greatly saddened to announce that our beloved friend and colleague, Professor Ken Seng Tan, passed away on January 1, 2023. 

Ken Seng Tan completed his BMath, MMath, and PhD in Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. His 1998 doctoral thesis won an award for Oustanding Achievement in Graduate Studies. It also marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship and collaboration with his supervisor, Phelim Boyle. 

Ken Seng joined the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science as faculty in 1998. He held a Canada Research Chair in Quantitative Risk Management from 2005 to 2010, and a University Research Chair from 2010 to 2015. From 2006 to 2015 he was Associate Director of the Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance and its successor, WatRISQ. Ken Seng also held a longterm visiting position at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, where he was active in supporting Chinese actuarial education and research. 

A research team led by Dr. Kyle Daun, an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, is working with a sophisticated infrared camera to more accurately measure how well flares convert methane into CO2 as part of the oil and gas industry.

Dr. Aukosh Jagannath, assistant professor of Statistics and Actuarial Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, has won a prestigious Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2022.

NeurIPS, short for Neural Information Processing Systems, is the foremost international conference for research on AI and Machine Learning. The conference receives thousands of submissions a year, and of the approximately 20% that are accepted, only a handful are recognized with the Outstanding Paper awards.

Learn more on the Faculty of Math website.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today announced $15 million in funding for the University of Waterloo’s Faculties of Mathematics and Environment to work with Indonesian partners on climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in the country.

The funding provided by Global Affairs Canada will support the Flood Impacts, Carbon Pricing, and Ecosystem Sustainability (FINCAPES) project. FINCAPES is led by Professor Stefan Steiner in collaboration with Professor David Landriault and Professor Brent Doberstein.

Read the full story on the Waterloo News website.

Tian, Qinglong (BEcon (Statistics), 2016, Renmin University of China; Ph.D. (Statistics), 2021, Iowa State University) will be joining the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science on November 1st, 2022 as an Assistant Professor. Before that, Qinglong Tian was a Research Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include reliability, resampling, and transfer learning. His current research focuses on developing statistical methods for data subject to distributional shifts.

Charmaine Dean, Vice President for Research and Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, has been named a Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Award Winner.

Continue reading on the Faculty of Math website.

For Jalisa Karim, interdisciplinary work comes naturally. The 2022 K.D. Fryer Gold Medal winner graduates this fall with a BMath in Biostatistics and BA in Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies (co-operative program). She has also earned a Co-operative Education in Research Certificate, and is on the Dean's Honours List. 

Continue reading on the Faculty of Math website.

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.

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.

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.