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.

Fanny Dupont and Rachel Lobay have been awarded the 2024-2025 Rick White Award.

The Rick White Award was established in 2017 to recognize undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a statistics program who demonstrate excellence in statistical science through collaboration with investigators in another discipline on a substantial application.

Fanny Dupont is supervised by Professor Marie Auger-Methe and has collaborated extensively with ecologists. She is part of a CANSSI collaborative research team that brings together researchers across the fields of statistics, ecology, and medicine to develop statistical models, specifically hidden Markov Models (HMMs), for biologging data. Fanny is the lead author of a paper published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution and has given workshops on hidden Markov models.

Rachel Lobay is supervised by Professor Daniel McDonald and has been working with Delphi Research Group to develop the theory and practice of epidemic detection, tracking, and forecasting. Her contributions include a lead-authored paper in Epidemics and work on two R packages, epiprocess and epipredict. She also co-instructed a workshop on "Epidemic Modelling and Forecasting." 

Congratulations to you both!