UBC Statistics congratulates Kaden Phi and Reyhan Pamungkas on being awarded the 2026 Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarship, which recognizes their outstanding academic achievements. 

Kaden Phi is currently a third-year student completing a combined honours degree in mathematics and statistics at UBC. In addition to this award, Kaden was also awarded a 2026 Y.P. Heung Foundation Post Secondary Award and a UBC Trek Excellence Scholarship in 2025. In both 2025 and 2026, Kaden was designated a UBC Faculty of Science Dean’s Scholar.

Reyhan Adhiguna Pamungkas is a fourth-year Honours Statistics major. His academic performance has been recognized with the Faculty of Science Dean's Scholar Award (2025 and 2026), along with the Outstanding International Student Award (2023) and the Beasiswa Indonesia Maju (2023), a scholarship from the Indonesian government awarded to academically and non-academically high-achieving students to pursue studies domestically and abroad. Outside of the classroom, Reyhan and his team placed 1st at the Data Quest Competition in 2025 and 2nd at DarkVision's Computer Vision Hackathon in 2024, both organized by UBC DSCI. 



The Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarship is awarded to two students annually—one to a student entering their third year of study at UBC and one to a student entering their fourth year. These scholarships recognize the academic merit of the next generation of statisticians and the impact that they will have in solving world problems. 

Dr. John Petkau is a professor emeritus in the UBC Department of Statistics. He has contributed in many ways to the department and the discipline, with his vision and leadership, his statistical expertise, his generosity of time, and his mentoring of both undergraduate and graduate students. 

UBC Statistics welcomes Dr. Jonathan Wakefield to our department, beginning September 1, 2026. Dr. Wakefield is one of nine world-leading researchers joining UBC through the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program. This program aims to strengthen Canada’s research capacity, train future talent, and drive innovation in areas critical to global competitiveness.

Dr. Wakefield’s research interest lies in biostatistics, specifically the intersection of methodology and global health, with special interests in spatial demography, small area estimation, spatial epidemiology, space-time models for infectious disease data, hierarchical models for survey data, ecological inference for non-infectious and infectious disease data, and links between Bayesian and frequent procedures. 

Since 2021, Dr. Wakefield has been a part of the World Health Organization (WHO) Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on COVID-19 Mortality Assessment and was responsible for leading the model development efforts, which produced estimates of excess mortality over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. From 1990 to 2019, Dr. Wakefield also worked in close coordination with the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), which uses data to support child and adolescent cause-specific mortality data generation, estimation, and use of estimates for policy and program decision-making.

Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Wakefield held a joint position in the Departments of Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Washington (1999-2026). From 2006 to 2007, he spent a year in the Genetic Epidemiology group at the International Agency for Research in Cancer in Lyon, France, before returning to the University of Washington, where he served as head of the Department of Statistics from 2009 to 2011. Dr. Wakefield completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham under the supervision of Dr. Adrian Smith. 

Outside of statistics, Dr. Wakefield is a fan of comedy (Tony Hancock and Laurel and Hardy) and music. He is also an avid traveller. 

We are excited to have Dr. Wakefield join UBC Statistics and look forward to the expertise and perspective he will bring to our department and the broader UBC community.
 

UBC Statistics congratulates PhD student Giuliano Netto Flores Cruz on receiving a 2026–2027 Li Tze Fong Memorial Fellowship.

Established by the Li family in memory of Mr. Li Tze Fong, these fellowships recognize outstanding doctoral students selected through the annual Tri-Agency Canada Graduate Research Scholarships – Doctoral (CGRS-D) and UBC-affiliated Fellowships competition.

On his achievement, Giuliano shared, "I'm thankful for the support from the Li family, the Department of Statistics, and UBC. This award means a lot and will help us continue developing statistical methods for high-dimensional biology."

Giuliano is currently a PhD student in statistics at the Korthauer Lab at UBC. His research interests include clinical prediction modelling using omics features, Bayesian statistics, and decision analysis. In addition to being a student, Giuliano is also a bioinformatics scientist at BiomeHub, a biotech startup from Brazil, where he provides statistics guidance for clinical microbiome research and writes production-ready software for omics data analysis. 

Congratulations to Giuliano on this well-deserved achievement!

The Department of Statistics is pleased to announce that Professor Daniel McDonald has been awarded the Statistical Society of Canada’s (SSC) 2026 Lise Manchester Award which recognizes excellence in state-of-the-art statistical work on problems of public interest, carried out within the last five years.

Dr. McDonald is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on understanding and measuring the accuracy of predictive models, particularly when dealing with complex or interconnected data. Dr. McDonald’s work has applications spanning a number of fields, including neuroscience, genetics, economics and epidemiology. He has carried out considerable work analyzing epidemiological data, in particular through his efforts to forecast the spread of respiratory illnesses using complex and large-scale data sources. His research has played a key role in improving how prediction risk is estimated and understood, particularly when it comes to public health.

Professor McDonald has been awarded the 2026 Lise Manchester award for his contributions to the evidence-based prediction of the spread of COVID-19, providing public health officials with reliable forecasts that inform public health decision-making. Since 2020, Professor McDonald has been a core member and co-principal investigator with Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi Research Group, which focuses on improving the detection, tracking and prediction of epidemics in the US, and a member of the now inactive BC COVID-19 Modelling Group, an independent group which worked on rapid response modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic - particularly in BC and Canada. Through his leadership, he created informative data bases and made them easily accessible to other researchers, and he developed state of the art open-source code. Through a series of publications, he has made available his methodological advancements.

UBC Statistics Department congratulates Professor McDonald on this well-deserved award!

The Lise Manchester Award commemorates the late Dr. Lise Manchester, a respected statistician whose work focused on applied statistical methods. Dr. Manchester held an enduring commitment to providing insights into matters of relevance to society at large. More information about the Lise Manchester Award can be found here: https://ssc.ca/en/award/lise-manchester-award.

UBC Statistics is pleased to announce that undergraduate student Wei Lu has been awarded the 2025-2026 Nash Medal. This annual award recognizes an outstanding student in the BSc Statistics program and honours the significant contributions made to the field by Professor Stanley Nash (1915–2001) during his more than forty years at UBC.

On being awarded the 2025-2026 Nash Medal, Wei Lu shared that the award is “not only a recognition of academic achievement but also a reminder to remain passionate and curious about statistics. I hope to carry forward Professor Nash’s spirit of service and dedication to the statistical community.” Wei also expressed his gratitude to the UBC Statistics Department for the support he received throughout his studies. 

We are happy to announce that Wei will be joining the UBC Statistics department as an MSc student in fall 2026.

About Professor Stanley Nash

Professor Nash came to UBC in 1950 just after finishing his Ph.D. in statistics at Berkeley. For a great many years, he was the only statistician on the campus and so established himself as the statistical expert. Professor Nash kept an electrical calculator on his desk and rendered consulting advice and service to generations of students and faculty at UBC. He maintained an active interest in the developments, which eventually led to the creation of the Statistical Society of Canada. For that and his other contributions to the development of the statistical sciences, Professor Nash was awarded an honorary membership in the Statistical Society of Canada in 1987.

The Department's Nash Medal, established in 1994, is supported by the Statistics Fund for Excellence.

The UBC Statistics Department Colloquium Series features talks that are broad, accessible, and engaging - and open to everyone!

The third talk of our series will take place on Monday, June 8th where we will welcome Stephanie Hicks, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University.

Date: Monday, June 8, 2026
Time: 3 - 4 PM
Location: ESB 5104/5106

Title: Statistical methods for single-cell and spatial data science

Abstract: Genomics is going through a data revolution where we can now profile gene expression at a single-cell or 2D spatial resolution. However, these data present unique challenges that have required the development of specialized statistical and computational methods and software infrastructure to successfully derive biological insights. Compared to bulk RNA-seq, there is an increased scale of the number of observations (or cells) that are measured and there is increased sparsity of the data, or fraction of observed zeros. Furthermore, as single-cell technologies mature, the increasing complexity and volume of data require fundamental changes in data access, management, and infrastructure alongside specialized methods to facilitate scalable analyses. I will discuss some challenges in the analysis of data and present some solutions that we have made towards addressing these challenges.

This colloquium series is sponsored in part by the Constance van Eeden Endowment.

Former UBC Statistics PhD student Xiaoting Li has been awarded the 2026 Statistical Society of Canada’s Pierre Robillard Award, which recognizes the best PhD thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university.

Xiaoting’s thesis titled “Multivariate Extreme Value Inference Based on Tail Expansions of Copulas with Applications to Systemic Risk Analysis” was completed under the supervision of UBC Statistics Professor Harry Joe. 

Reflecting on the award,  Xioating shared: "It means so much to have my PhD research on copulas and extreme value theory recognized, especially as I finish my studies and transition into the next stage of my academic career. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with my supervisor, Professor Harry Joe. His approach to research has profoundly shaped how I view and conduct my work. I hope to carry forward that same spirit in my own research and mentorship."

While completing her PhD at UBC, Xioating was awarded the 2025 Marshall Price for Excellence in Statistics and the Lorraine Schwartz Prize in Probability. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Manitoba. 

Read more about Xioating’s Award

Congratulations to Dr. Geoff Pleiss and his students on being awarded the AISTATS 2026 Best Student Paper Award.  

The paper, “We Still Don’t Understand High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization,” was authored by Dr. Pleiss, his former research intern Colin Dumont, his current computer science student Donney Fan, and other collaborators.

Dr. Pleiss shared: "This paper was one of the most exciting I’ve ever worked on, and I’m honoured that the community found it impactful as well. I'm especially excited for my trainees who made this project possible through their hard work."

Congratulations Dr. Pleiss and team!

Congratulations to Rachel Lobay on being awarded a 2025 Graduate Teaching Award!

Rachel is currently a PhD Student in the department of Statistics. In addition to this award, she is the recipient of a Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award (2025 - 2026) and a Rick White Award (2024 - 2025).

The Graduate Teaching Award recognizes Rachel's commitment to teaching and the positive impact she has had on students.

Congratulations, Rachel!