This year’s recipients of the Dr John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships are Huaiwen (Angela) Dong and Kenny Chiu.
Kenny is entering his fourth year in a combined honours in Statistics and Computer Science (CS) and is also in the CS co-op program. Kenny is currently working on Data Migration with the UBC SASI team that is in charge of the initiative to replace the current student information system (Goodbye CONNECT! Hello CANVAS!). He is involved with data-related activities such as profiling, quality, and creating visualizations. On previous co-op terms he worked at the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CARIS) lab under UBC Mechanical Engineering and at Safe Software as a Platforms Developer co-op.
Angela is entering her third year, majoring in Statistics with a minor in Economics. She is interested in developing data science and visualization skills, in making connections between Economics and Statistics, and in exploring all of the opportunities studies in Statistics can bring.
In 2016, John and Barbara Petkau endowed two scholarships to recognize the academic merit of the next generation of statisticians and the impact these statisticians will have on the solving of world problems. One scholarship is for a student entering Third Year and the other is for a student entering Fourth Year.
John Petkau, a professor in the Department, 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 undergraduate and graduate students. And his wife, Barbara, deserves special thanks, for generously sharing John's time with us.
Read more about the award and its previous recipients here: https://www.stat.ubc.ca/dr-john-and-barbara-petkau-scholarship.