News

Congratulations to Professor Ruodu Wang for being the first recipient of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Actuarial Science Early Career Award. 

There have been few major international awards for researchers in Actuarial Science in recognition of their overarching scholarly achievements, as opposed to individual paper awards. To fill this gap, and to facilitate excellence and recognize leadership in actuarial research, the SOA has launched the Early Career Award this year (2021), which is expected to be awarded annually to one scholar within 10 years of independent academic career in Actuarial Science. For more details on the creation of this award, see the SOA Education and Research Section Publications.

PhD candidate Yuyu Chen in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science recently won the Maplesoft Best Student Paper Award at the 24th International Congress on Insurance: Mathematics and Economics. 

The 24th International Congress on Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, which took place on July 5-9, 2021 online, is the largest international academic conference in Actuarial Science. Yuyu Chen won one of the three Best Student Paper Awards for the presented paper entitled "Aggregation of two ordered risks with dependence uncertainty" (authors: Yuyu Chen, Liyuan Lin, Ruodu Wang). The Award is sponsored by Maplesoft. 

In the presented paper, the authors address a problem concerning the aggregation of two random losses when the marginal distributions are known and the dependence structure is unknown, under the additional constraint that one loss is no larger than the other. Such a problem is intimately linked to the recently introduced notion of directional optimal transport in mass transportation theory. The full paper is available online at arXiv.

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science would like to congratulate Qiuqi Wang as being one of the four new recipients of the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Hickman Scholar for 2021-2022, and to Wenyuan Li and Yechao Meng for having their stipend renewed.

The Hickman scholar is a prestigious honour for PhD students in North America who work in fields related to Actuarial Science. According to the description from SOA, each recipient will receive a $20,000 stipend for the 2021—2022 academic year. The program provides stipends to doctoral candidates who will, through their studies and careers, address research and education needs of the actuarial profession.

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.”