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 took 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. Lastly, Nikola held an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (Master’s level) of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and was a recipient of 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 is pleased to announce that Margarita Kapustina has been selected as the recipient of the 2025–2026 Department of Statistics Award in Data Science.

Margarita 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,” Margarita 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.

Congratulations to UBC Statistics Assistant Professor Geoff Pleiss, who has been awarded a 2025 Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award.

This award, presented to six winners every year, recognizes outstanding junior Bayesian research.

As a Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award recipient, Geoff will present his work in the Junior Bayes Beyond the Borders (JB^3) webinar series.

Congratulations Geoff!

Congratulations to Xiaoting Li, who has been awarded the Lorraine Schwartz Prize for the 2024-25 academic year. The award is given annually by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics for distinctions in the fields of statistics and probability. 

Xiaoting recently defended her Ph.D. thesis in Statistics, supervised by Professor Harry Joe. Her thesis work on multivariate tail inference and extremes, plus other research during her Master's at McGill led to publications in the journals Entropy, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Environmetrics, and Journal of the American Statistical Association.  Her important applications of statistics and probability have included systemic risk for financial institutions, extreme flood insurance losses, and other areas. Xiaoting also had valuable roles at UBC as instructor of a course and in service roles.  She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Manitoba.

The prize was established in 1966 in memory of Dr. Lorraine Schwartz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1960-1965, by her friends and colleagues.  Dr. Schwartz received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960, working with Professor Lucien Le Cam, with a thesis entitled "Consistency of Bayes' Procedures".   She then took a position at UBC where she remained until her untimely death.  However even in her brief career, she made seminal contributions to her field in published research papers that are still cited today.

For more details about the Lorraine Schwartz Prize, please see https://www.stat.ubc.ca/lorraine-schwartz-prize.

The UBC Statistics Department proudly announces that Assistant Professor Keegan Korthauer has been named a recipient of a 2025 Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Award.

The Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Program is designed to support early-career researchers in establishing their independent careers, building research teams, and developing innovative programs that drive cutting-edge health solutions.

Dr. Korthauer's research group is tackling the complex challenge of extracting meaningful biological insights from massive-scale genomic experiments. Her team develops rigorous statistical frameworks and computational tools to leverage the vast scope and scale of high-throughput sequencing data. This work is critical to uncovering new molecular signals associated with major health issues, including cancer, child health, and development.

About Michael Smith Health Research BC
Michael Smith Health Research BC is the province's health research funding agency. It is dedicated to supporting the best health research, researchers, and research talent to improve health and health care.