News

The Nash Medal this year is awarded to Janet Lam. Janet has completed a major in Statistics and a minor in Computer Science, and she will graduate this year with distinction. The majority of her grades have been in the 90s, and she has completed 4 Co-op work terms. Last year, Janet was awarded the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarship, and she has also received the Trek Excellence scholarship as well as scholarships from the Computer Science Department. 

Undergraduate Kris Hong and PhD student Guohai Zhou are the first recipients of the Rick White Award. This recently established award recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application. The award honours the memory of Rick White, who served the Department and the University with his gifts in Applied Statistics.  

The Greater Vancouver Regional Science Fair, held at UBC April 6 – 8, 2017, showcased amazing projects from students from many schools in the Lower Mainland. This year, we honoured these 3 teams of students with the 2017 UBC Statistics Award: 

Junior division 

“Qui le dit en premier” 

By Claudia Hill and Isabella Haas-Bardi from Alpha Secondary 

Read about their project:  http://bit.ly/2qoFhMa 

We are very proud of our PhD alumnus Andy Leung for having received the Pierre Robillard Award from the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC). This award recognizes “the best PhD thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university during the previous year”. Andy won this prize for his thesis “Robust Estimation and Inference under Cellwise and Casewise Contamination”, which was supervised by Professor Ruben Zamar.

We are pleased to announce that Fred (Hongyang) Zhang has won the Department’s 2016-17 Data Science Award.

Graduate Teaching Assistants are crucial to the Department’s teaching activities. Every year since 2011, we have recognized GTA excellence via the Statistics Department Graduate Teaching Award.

The recipient of this year’s Marshall Prize is Yang (Seagle) Liu.

ASDa staff and recent MSc graduate Jeff Bone developed and executed the detailed statistical analysis plan for a recently reported study about the controversial "liberation therapy", finding no significant impact of the therapy. This work adds to the many ways Statistics Department members have contributed to medical research into this debilitating disease. Indeed, in 2014, Professor John Petkau received the Statistical Society of Canada's Impact Award, largely for such work. To read more about this study, please see

Kevin Multani has received full funding from CANSSI and SAMSI to attend a SAMSI Interdisciplinary Workshop for Undergraduate Students, from May 14 – 19. The workshop is an introduction to applied mathematical and statistical research in the area of Astronomy and Optimization.

Microsoft has provided $1 million to fund UBC and the University of Washington in a data science initiative, the Cascadia Urban Analytics Cooperative.  As UBC President Ono said in the UBC press release, which gives details of the initiative, "Thanks to this generous gift from Microsoft, our two universities are poised to help transform the Cascadia region into a technological hub comparable to Silicon Valley and Boston".