News

The Sprott Scholarship is named after Professor D.A. Sprott, the founding Chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, and is awarded annually to a registered full-time student who has been recognized by the Department as having shown particular promise in research in the PhD program prior to the final approval of their thesis. The selection is made by the Awards subcommittee of the Statistics and Actuarial Science Graduate Committee.

Congratulations to the 2020 recipients:

• Yuyu Chen (PhD Actuarial Science)
• Fangya Mao (PhD Statistics (Biostatistics))
• Kelly Ramsay (PhD Statistics)

The accolade is given annually to a statistician who embodies the three-fold accomplishments of Dr. Donald B. Owen. Owen excelled in the areas of research, statistical consultation, and service to the statistical community.

Richard J. Cook, a professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences, has been named a fellow the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). The prestigious RSC award accentuates Cook’s storied academic career and voluminous research portfolio.

Vice-President, Research and International Charmaine Dean has been elected the Vice-President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Chair of NSERC Council. The roles of Chair of Council and Vice-President of NSERC are concurrent leadership roles at NSERC. NSERC Council is composed of its president and up to 18 other members appointed from the public and private sectors.

View the full news item on the Daily Bulletin. 

Cecilia Cotton from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences has been named a winner 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.

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.