This year’s recipients of the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships are Chenyue Qian and Yujie Chen.
Chenyue Qian is a Statistics major with stellar grades in all courses and the recipient of the Faculty of Science International Student Scholarship and the Trek Excellence Scholarship for Continuing Students. In the summer of 2021, he was an intern at the Bank of Ningbo, which helped him build more knowledge about the financial markets. In the summer of 2022, he spent time in a project about Score Differences Prediction in NBA Regular Season Basketball Games. He wrote codes to clean the data and built the linear model for prediction by creating proper design matrix. In the future, Chenyue is looking forward to learning more about Statistics and implement those knowledge into real-world problems.
Yujie Chen is majoring in Statistics with a minor in Commerce. She has won the Outstanding International Student Award and has been honoured with a Trek Excellence Scholarship for Continuing Students and the J Fred Muir Memorial Scholarship in Science. She has received top grades in courses on Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, and Commerce. She has also had several co-op placements. Through a co-op placement with Greenlight Innovation, she has developed skills involving web development and machine learning. In addition, she is now working at National Research Council Canada as a co-op student with a focus on data analysis and web development. Yujie plans to go to graduate school to learn more about data science and pursue a career as a data scientist in the future.
About the Dr. John and Barbara Petkau Scholarships
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 solving 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 emeritus in the Department, has contributed in many ways to the Department and the discipline with his vision and leadership, statistical expertise, generosity of time, and his mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. John’s wife, Barbara, deserves special thanks, for generously sharing John's time with us.
See a list of previous recipients of the scholarships here.