News Item - 97
The 2012 Lorraine Schwartz Prize has been awarded to Lei (Larry) Hua, PhD student in Statistics.
In memory of Dr. Lorraine Schwartz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1960-65, her friends and colleagues established this prize in 1966. It is awarded annually for distinctions in the fields of statistics and probability to an undergraduate or graduate student upon the recommendation of the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics. You can find
more information about Dr Schwartz, along with a list of award recipients. You will see some familiar names on that list!
Larry is completing his PhD in the Statistics Department under the direction of Harry Joe, with the thesis defense on May 31 12:30 pm.
Larry's PhD topic is "Multivariate Extremal Dependence and Risk Measures", a topic he chose because of its importance in insurance. The thesis has required deep knowledge of extreme value theory, copulas and risk measures and uses a lot of probability and statistics. Two papers from his PhD thesis have already been published (in the Journal of Multivariate Analysis and in Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, both in 2011). A third paper from the thesis was accepted in March 2012 and a fourth paper is being revised.
Larry is an Associate of the Society of Actuaries and worked as an actuary in China and in Canada. He held Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarships from 2009 to 2012. He received his MSc from the University of Calgary in 2008 and published two papers based on his MSc research.
In August 2012, Larry will join Northern Illinois University's Department of Mathematical Sciences Division of Statistics, which includes actuarial science, as an Assistant Professor.
