News

Professor Matthias Schonlau of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). His citation reads: "For notable contributions to survey methodology in both industry and academia, for serving as a connector between statistics and the social sciences via accessible publications, education, and software, and for service to the profession."

The designation of ASA Fellow has been a significant honor for nearly 100 years. Under ASA bylaws, the Committee on Fellows can elect up to one-third of one percent of the total association membership as fellows each year.

Associate Professor Marius Hofert was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Accelerator Supplement for his suggested new work on copula modeling with generative neural networks.

Statistics and Actuarial Science Professor Pengfei Li has received a 2020 Faculty of Mathematics Golden Jubilee Research Excellence Award.

Lucy Gao holds a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of Washington. Her research is working in the areas of statistical machine learning, applied optimization, and experiment design. She is interested in tackling problems in complex data settings, such as multi-view data, network data, compositional data, and spatial data.

Congratulations to the researchers in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science who have been awarded a 2019 Outstanding Performance Award announced by Vice-President, Academic and Provost Jim Rush.

While a high school student in Toronto, Maysum Panju knew that the University of Waterloo was the destination for math. While working on his undergraduate degree and Master’s in computational math, he started learning about machine learning. That led to his interests in developing algorithms and theoretical proofs and he decided to start his PhD in statistics.

Congratulations to Dylan Spicker (University of Waterloo) and team member Melissa Van Bussel (Carleton University) in their first place finish for their work on Case Study #2: Predicting podcast popularity in iTunes at the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) 2020 Case Studies in Data Analysis Competition. Dylan is currently a SAS PhD student studying in the field of Statistics.  

To learn more about this competition, please visit the SSC competition website.

Shixiao Zhang is this year’s winner of the Pierre Robillard Award of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) which recognizes the best PhD thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university in a given year. His thesis, entitled “Multiply Robust Empirical Likelihood Inference for Missing Data and Causal Inference Problems," was written while Shixiao was a doctoral student in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at University of Waterloo under the supervision of Dr. Peisong Han and Dr. Changbao Wu.

Professors Changbao Wu and Mary Thompson, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo, have a new book entitled “Sampling Theory and Practice” published by Springer.