News

The Statistics Department offers several types of free statistical consultation, via STAT 450/550, SOS, and STAT 551, as follows.

September 24^th, 2019

The Department of Statistics applauds the student-led movement that is bringing increased attention to the dangers of unmitigated global warming. All evidence points to an urgent need for far stronger responses to the threat. Looking outward, as statistical scientists we are particular proponents of building and respecting principled paths from data to evidence to public policy. Looking inward, we recognize our own obligations to reduce and mitigate climate impacts.

We’re pleased to announce this year’s recipients of the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships, Hayden McTavish and Naitong Chen.

Naitong Chen is entering his fourth year in the Statistics program. He’s currently working on a summer USRA with our department’s Assistant Professor Trevor Campbell.

Hayden McTavish is entering his third year in the Combined Major Statistics and Computer Science program. He's also working on a summer USRA, co-supervised by Professor Campbell and through Computer Science.

The Department of Statistics offers several types of free statistical consultation, via STAT 551, SOS, and STAT 450/550, as follows:

At the recent 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings, Will Welch was recognized as Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). 

The citation reads:

Our professor Rollin Brant is retiring after a brilliant collaborative career in biostatistics. As a professor in the Department of Statistics and an investigator at BC Children’s Hospital, Rollin made many significant contributions to the health sciences.

To read about Rollin's career, see BC Children’s Hospital’s story celebrating Rollin.

We were very happy to read the Government of Canada’s recent announcement of new and renewed Canada Research Chairs (CRCs), especially because one of our Assistant Professors, Marie Auger-Méthé, was on the list of new CRC recipients. Marie has now been named as a CRC Tier II in Statistical Ecology.

The Department is very pleased to announce that two new Assistant Professors are joining our ranks this summer!

Dr. Benjamin Bloem-Reddy will take up his appointment on July 1, 2019. Ben obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics from Columbia University in 2017 then subsequently was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. His work in statistical learning and applied probability delves into new methods and theory for the analysis of structured data, such as networks.

Our M.Sc. student Lucy Mosquera received support from the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) for attending and presenting a poster at the recent Atlantic Causal Inference Conference (ACIC) 2019 in Montreal (worth CAD 1,250).

We were pleased to hear news from the 2019 Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) Annual Meeting that two of our Statistics Ph.D. students, Xin Ding and Qiong Zhang, won the Case Study #1 category (https://ssc.ca/en/case-study/case-study-1-counting-cells-microscopic-images) in the 2019 Case Studies in Data Analysis Competition at this year’s SSC Annual Meeting.

Qiong and Xin were mentored in the work on the case study by Professor Will Welch.