News

STRINGER, Alex (BSc, 2014, University of Guelph; MSc, 2015; PhD, 2021, both from the University of Toronto), will be joining Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science on July 1, 2021 as an Assistant Professor.  Mr. Stringer is completed his PhD in Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto.

Professor Jun Cai (Statistics and Actuarial Science, Waterloo) and his co-author Dr. Tiantian Mao (former postdoc in Statistics and Actuarial Science,  Waterloo, currently Associate Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China) have been awarded the International Actuarial Association’s Bob Alting von Geusau Prize for 2020 for their paper titled "Risk Measures Derived From a Regulator’s Perspective on the Regulatory Capital Requirements for Insurers" published in ASTIN Bulletin. 

The paper proposes new risk measures from a regulator’s perspective on the regulatory capital requirements. The new risk measures not only generalize the existing, well-known risk measures in the literature, including the Dutch, Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR), and expectile measures, but also provide new approaches to generate feasible and practical coherent risk measures. These new risk measures emphasize the control of downside risks and are particularly useful for agents who face serious downside risks. 

The Bob Alting von Geusau Prize, sponsored by the Actuarial Approach for Financial Risks (AFIR-ERM) Section of the International Actuarial Association(IAA), is presented annually for the best article published in ASTIN Bulletin with a Financial Risk or Enterprise Risk Management focus. The prize comes with 5,000 Canadian Dollars and an invitation to present the paper at the AFIR-ERM colloquium next year.

To learn more about the Bob Alting von Geusau Prize or the AFIR-ERM, visit the IAA website.

Mary E. Thompson, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Statistics at the University of Waterloo, has been named an Honorary Member of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC). This award is intended to honor an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the development of the statistical sciences in Canada and whose work has had a major impact in this country.

To learn more about Mary's achievement, please see the full award annoucement on the SSC website.

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science would like to congratulate Junhan Fang as 2021 Pierre Robillard Award winner for her thesis "Matrix-Variate Regression with Measurement Error".  This achievement is awarded by the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) each year to the probility or statistics PhD student who best defended their thesis at a Canadian University in a given year. 

To learn more about Junhan's thesis, please see the full award annoucement on the SSC website.

Starting Friday, April 30 at noon, 127 Waterloo undergraduate students found themselves knee-deep in data for 48 hours at the University of Waterloo’s 2021 American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest.

Mary Thompson (Statistics and Actuarial Science), David Hammond, (School of Public Health and Health Systems), and Geoffrey Fong (Psychology), were jointly awarded a 2021 Governor General’s Innovation Award for the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Project.

The ITC Project is headed by Fong and conducts research into effective tobacco control policies such as graphic health warnings, smoke free laws, advertising bans and tobacco taxes. The Award celebrates excellence in innovation that makes a positive impact on quality of life in Canada.

Read the whole story on Waterloo News.

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.”

Changbao Wu, Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at University of Waterloo, has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).

Dr. Wu is honored with the fellowship for his “important and original research contributions to survey sampling theory and official statistics, especially for the development of model-calibration theory and techniques, empirical likelihood methods for complex surveys, and robust inferential procedures for analyzing non-probability samples”.

Founded in 1935, the IMS is one of the world’s premier societies in statistics and probability. Each Fellow nominee is assessed by a committee of their peers and the election is based on “demonstrated distinction in research in statistics or probability, by publication of independent work of merit”. This qualification may be partly or wholly waived in the case of either a candidate of well-established leadership whose contribution to the field of statistics or probability other than original research shall be judged of equal value; or a candidate of well-established leadership in the application of statistics or probability, whose work has contributed greatly to the utility of and the appreciation of these areas.

The list of the 2021 class of IMS Fellows can be found at the IMS website.

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.