The UBC Department of Statistics congratulates Kevin Lin, Director of Finance, HR, and Operations, on being awarded a 2025 Faculty of Science Excellence in Service Award.
This award recognizes staff and faculty who have made exceptional contributions beyond their regular responsibilities, advancing the mission and strategic goals of UBC Science through their dedication, service, and impact.
The Department of Statistics is soliciting nominations for the Department of Statistics Award in Data Science, an award to recognize the importance of developing and applying tools to answer important questions through the analysis of data.
This $1,000 award is offered to an undergraduate or graduate student who has demonstrated initiative and creativity in making outstanding contributions in the field of Data Science. The award is made on the recommendation of the Department of Statistics Awards Committee and, in the case of a graduate student, in consultation with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.
The nominee must be an undergraduate or graduate student enrolled at UBC Vancouver during the 2025-26 Winter session or must have graduated in November 2025. The nominator must be a faculty member or someone in a suitable supervisory position, such as a co-op supervisor or research supervisor. Student self-nominations will not be accepted.
The nominator is to submit the following material as a PDF toea@stat.ubc.ca, with subject line Data Science Award Nominationby Tuesday, February 17, 2026:
A description written by the student of their achievements related to Data Science (not to exceed 1 page, minimum 12 point font);
A student resume/curriculum vitae; and
A supporting letter from the nominator (not to exceed 1 page, minimum 12 point font).
While the Committee will consider high grades in relevant courses, the Committee will look beyond grades to more substantial achievements related to Data Science. Some examples of achievements are:
Creative and impactful data analysis via visualization techniques;
Development of software to implement an innovative statistical approach; and
Improvement of the computational aspects of a data analysis approach.
Such activities might have been as a course project or thesis, an end-product of a relevant co-op experience, or participation in an online Data Science competition, such as Kaggle.
Congratulations to Xiaoting Li, who has been awarded the Lorraine Schwartz Prize for the 2024-25 academic year. The award is given annually by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics for distinctions in the fields of statistics and probability.
Xiaoting recently defended her Ph.D. thesis in Statistics, supervised by Professor Harry Joe. Her thesis work on multivariate tail inference and extremes, plus other research during her Master's at McGill led to publications in the journals Entropy, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Environmetrics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. Her important applications of statistics and probability have included systemic risk for financial institutions, extreme flood insurance losses, and other areas. Xiaoting also had valuable roles at UBC as instructor of a course and in service roles. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Manitoba.
The prize was established in 1966 in memory of Dr. Lorraine Schwartz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1960-1965, by her friends and colleagues. Dr. Schwartz received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, working with Professor Lucien Le Cam, with a thesis entitled "Consistency of Bayes' Procedures". She then took a position at UBC where she remained until her untimely death. However even in her brief career, she made seminal contributions to her field in published research papers that are still cited today.
The Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Program is designed to support early-career researchers in establishing their independent careers, building research teams, and developing innovative programs that drive cutting-edge health solutions.
Dr. Korthauer's research group is tackling the complex challenge of extracting meaningful biological insights from massive-scale genomic experiments. Her team develops rigorous statistical frameworks and computational tools to leverage the vast scope and scale of high-throughput sequencing data. This work is critical to uncovering new molecular signals associated with major health issues, including cancer, child health, and development.
About Michael Smith Health Research BC Michael Smith Health Research BC is the province's health research funding agency. It is dedicated to supporting the best health research, researchers, and research talent to improve health and health care.
Fanny Dupont and Rachel Lobay have been awarded the 2024-2025 Rick White Award.
The Rick White Award was established in 2017 to recognize undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a statistics program who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application.
Fanny Dupont is supervised by Professor Marie Auger-Methe and has collaborated extensively with ecologists. She is part of a CANSSI collaborative research team that brings together researchers across the fields of statistics, ecology, and medicine to develop statistical models, specifically hidden Markov Models (HMMs), for biologging data. Fanny is the lead author of a paper published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution and has given workshops on hidden Markov models.
Rachel Lobay is supervised by Professor Daniel McDonald and has been working with Delphi Research Group to develop the theory and practice of epidemic detection, tracking, and forecasting. Her contributions include a lead-authored paper in Epidemics and work on two R packages, epiprocess and epipredict. She also co-instructed a workshop on "Epidemic Modelling and Forecasting."
