Statistics PhD student Anthony Christidis is the recipient of the 2021-22 Department of Statistics Award in Data Science. Anthony has carried out exceptional work tackling new data analysis problems and collaborating with researchers and industry professionals. He is an expert in scientific computing and software development, in particular, in support of his variable splitting methods that require non-convex optimization, the subject of his thesis with Statistics professor Ruben Zamar and Professor Stefan Van Aelst from KU Lueven. Anthony’s methods and software have been used in an article on the diagnosis of ovarian cancer using multi-omics data with high accuracy, and he will be collaborating on similar work with prostate cancer diagnosis. In work with the financial industry, he has developed methods and software using tools from robust statistics and signal processing to evaluate the accuracy of risk and performance metrics for serially-correlated returns of assets. He has contributed an impressive number of R libraries – 11 – to CRAN.
This award recognizes the importance of developing and applying tools to answer important questions through the analysis of data and is offered annually to an undergraduate or graduate student who has demonstrated initiative and creativity in making outstanding contributions in the field of Data Science. Recipients can be from any undergraduate or graduate program at UBC-Vancouver.
Congratulations, Anthony!
To learn more about this award and previous award recipients, please see: https://www.stat.ubc.ca/data-science-award