News

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.

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.

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.

NEGERI, Zelalem [BSc. (Statistics), 2011, Addis Ababa University; MSc. (Statistics), 2014, Addis Ababa University; MSc. (Statistics), 2015, McMaster University; Ph.D. (Statistics), 2019, McMaster University] has joined the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science on July 1, 2022, as an Assistant Professor. Zelalem was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at McGill University’s Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health from 2019 to 2021, and worked as a Biostatistician at Veristat, LLC, a global clinical research organization before joining the University of Waterloo. His research interest focuses on developing and validating statistical methods for applications in public health research, with an emphasis on both aggregate data and individual participant data meta-analyses of diagnostic and screening test accuracy studies.

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is pleased to announce Yue (Henry) Weng as the winner of the Samuel Eckler Medal in Actuarial Science. Henry graduated in Spring 2022 with a triple major in Actuarial Science, Statistics, and Combinatorics & Optimization.

Award description: 

This prize was established to recognize the contribution of Samuel Eckler to the actuarial profession and is provided by Eckler Partners. The medal, which is cast in gold, is awarded each year to the outstanding graduating student in Honours Actuarial Science.

"Henry is one of the most talented students I have taught at the University of Waterloo. His analytical skills are amazing. A well-deserved medal for him."