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.

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!

Congratulations to PhD student Gian Carlo Diluvi on receiving a 2025 Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.

Gian Carlo is currently pursuing his PhD in Statistics at UBC, having previously completed his MSc in Statistics at UBC in 2021. 

Since joining the department in 2019, he has contributed extensively as a teaching assistant, and from 2021 to 2024 he has also served as a teaching assistant trainer.

This award recognizes Gian Carlo’s outstanding commitment to teaching and his meaningful impact on student learning.

Congratulations, Gian Carlo!

Congratulations to UBC Statistics PhD student Rachel Lobay on receiving the 2025–2026 Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award!

This award highlights the outstanding impact that graduate teaching assistants have on teaching and learning at UBC. Each year, up to nineteen graduate teaching assistants are selected for this honour — this year, Rachel is one of them.

Please join us in celebrating Rachel for this truly well‑earned achievement!

Congratulations to Nikola Surjanovic on being awarded the 2025-2026 Marshall Prize.

Nikola is in his final year at UBC and will be graduating with a PhD in Statistics under the supervision of Dr. Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Dr. Trevor Campbell. While completing his PhD, Nikola has taken on the role of Applied Scientist II (ML/AI) at Amazon, working on the supply chain optimization Technologies team.

Among his many achievements, Nikola was a core contributor and founding member of the Pigeons software project, which offers assistance with sampling and integration problems. He was also a co-chair and founding member of the Student Committee of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society. His academic excellence has been recognized through several distinctions, including the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (Master’s level) from NSERC and the Governor General’s Silver Medal.

The Marshall Prize honours Professor Albert Marshall for his seminal work in the theory of statistical reliability and for his contributions to the development of statistics at UBC. The prize is awarded to an outstanding M.Sc. or Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics who has demonstrated excellence in the discipline of statistics as demonstrated by strength in the development and application of statistical methodology.

To learn more about this award and Professor Marshall and previous recipients, please visit: https://www.stat.ubc.ca/marshall-prize

The Department of Statistics at UBC is pleased to announce that Margarita Kapustina has been selected as the recipient of the 2025–2026 Department of Statistics Award in Data Science.

Kapustina is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience in the Cembrowski Lab at UBC, where her work sits at the intersection of neuroscience and data science. Her research focuses on developing open‑source analytical tools that enable scientists to extract meaningful insights from large‑scale biological datasets.

“This award highlights how developing open‑source analytical tools can transform large-scale biological datasets into meaningful discoveries about the brain's cellular organization and function,” Kapustina said. “These discoveries provide the framework to advance our understanding of neurological diseases and identify novel therapeutic targets.”

Her supervisor, Dr. Mark Cembrowski, praised her contributions and impact: “Margo is a rising star in both data science and computational neuroscience. In just a few years as a graduate student, she has developed a variety of open-source tools enabling analysis of complex transcriptional datasets, which have had broad uptake in the scientific community. She has also applied these tools in a variety of settings to reveal new—and previously unforeseen—rules of how the brain is organized into cell types.”

The Department of Statistics Award in Data Science recognizes students who demonstrate initiative, creativity, and excellence in applying data-driven methods to meaningful questions. The annual $1,000 award is open to undergraduate and graduate students from any program at UBC Vancouver who have made outstanding contributions to the field of data science.

The Department extends its warmest congratulations to Margarita Kapustina on this well‑deserved achievement.

Dr. Marie Auger-Méthé is the recipient of one of six UBC Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships which are provided annually from the Killam endowment established through a bequest from the late Dorothy J. Killam. The Killam Accelerator Research Fellowships (KARF) are designed to empower early‑career scholars who have already demonstrated notable impact in their fields and are poised to advance to the next stage of their research careers, providing research funding and valuable time to devote to their work.

Dr. Auger-Méthé is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF). She also holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Statistical Ecology and is a leading figure in the investigation of animal movement. Dr. Auger-Méthé is internationally known for developing data analysis tools used by research ecologists to better understand animal behaviour and by government agencies to guide concrete management decisions, and she has collaborated with Indigenous hunters to meaningfully integrate Indigenous knowledge into statistical analysis. Her research output includes papers in ecological and statistics journals, and accompanying R packages.  Her publication record—over 60 peer-reviewed papers as an associate professor—is exceptional and more typical of a full professor in the discipline.

Dr. Auger-Méthé has developed state space and hierarchical models to better capture the complexity of animal movement, yet still maintain interpretability. Her highly cited first-authored 2021 Ecological Monographs paper showcases her expertise in applications of state-space modelling to ecological time series and her ability to communicate complex technical information to ecologists. Her contributions to Hidden Markov Models include accounting for the fine-scale dependence and multiscale structure associated with high-frequency data, providing accurate classification with sparse labels, speeding up fitting algorithms, and automatically selecting the number of hidden states. In a series of papers, she has incorporated Indigenous knowledge into statistical analyses to understand seal behaviour and habitat use.  She has also used citizen science from whale-watching, accounting for the spatially-biased search effort present in such opportunistic datasets.

This fellowship will allow Dr. Auger- Méthé to develop data-based methods and resources to guide decisions to identify critical habitat. The work will build on her research in hierarchical models and in combining different forms of data, including citizen science data and Indigenous Knowledge. Through this work, she will create easy-to-use tools that identify Critical Habitats quickly and accurately and which will facilitate the protection of such habitats via governmental policies (e.g., recovery strategies and marine protected areas). She will also create an open-access repository of Critical Habitat information that can be used by NGOs, First Nations, and other groups when advocating for the protection of imperilled species. Such work is urgently needed to address biodiversity loss and generate systematic ways of meeting Canada’s conservation goals. To demonstrate the usefulness of these tools, she will apply them to marine mammals and seabirds data in areas with increasing shipping and energy developments.

Congratulations, Dr. Auger-Méthé!