LSE SU Student-Led Teaching Award
We are delighted to announce that Dr Kostas Kardaras|, a Reader in our Risk & Stochastics group, is one of five winners of the 2013 LSE Students' Union Student-Led Teaching Awards. Duncan McKenna, the Education Officer in the LSE Students' Union, wrote, when announcing the awards, "We asked students to highlight teachers for this award, students were asked to highlight those teachers who had shown exceptional commitment to the teaching of their students, those who had expended their knowledge beyond the classroom and had a profound effect on their lives and their time at the LSE through teaching creative, incisively and through creating opportunities for them in the wider world." The other four winners were Ernestina Coast (Social Policy), Robin Mills (International History), Lijing Shi (Language Centre) and Christopher Blunt (Philosophy).
Guy Medal in Bronze awarded to Professor Piotr Fryzlewicz
The department is very pleased to announce that Professor Piotr Fryzlewicz| has been awarded the Guy Medal in Bronze by the Royal Statistical Society. Named after the physician and medical statistician William Augustus Guy, FRS, this award acknowledges Professor Fryzlewicz's significant contribution to time series research as the originator of the Haar-Fisz transform, in particular for his two papers, Haar-Fisz estimation of evolutionary wavelet spectra| and GOES-8 X-ray sensor variance stabilization using the multiscale data-driven Haar-Fisz transform|, published in the Society's journals in 2006 and 2007.
Royal Statistical Society Research Prize
We are delighted to announce that Dr Haeran Cho| has been awarded the Royal Statistical Society Research Prize for her contribution to the paper High-dimensional variable selection via tilting|, co-authored with Professor Piotr Fryzlewicz, and to other published work on the methodology and applications of statistics. Dr Cho is a postdoctoral research officer, working with Professor Qiwei Yao of our Time Series group.
London Mathematical Finance Seminar Series Gets Under Way
The London Mathematical Finance Seminar Series| was successfully launched on 25 October 2012, with talks by Nizar Touzi| and Alexander Schied|. The seminar was attended by an large audience of practitioners and members of universities across London.
This new initiative is a joint seminar series organised by a partnership of the matematical finance groups of several London-based universities. The seminar series aims to bring the mathematical finance community in London closer together and provides a platform where both academics and practitioners are invited to discuss recent advances in the field. All are welcome to attend!
The seminar usually takes place bi-weekly on Thursdays from 4-7pm, with two talks per meeting.
The location of the seminar will alternate between all participating institutions. The Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics at LSE have the pleasure to host the seminar series in Michaelmas Term 2012. King’s College London will host the series in Lent Term 2013.
Full details of the seminar series can be found here|. The local organisers for the seminar series are Dr Luitgard Veraart| in the Department of Mathematics and Dr Hao Xing| in the Department of Statistics.
ICSA Distinguished Achievement award to be made to Professor Emeritus Howell Tong
The Department of Statistics is delighted to announce that Professor Emeritus Howell Tong has been selected as a recipient of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Distinguished Achievement award. This award honours his achievements and leadership in statistical research, education and statistical applications.
Howell joined LSE as Professor of Statistics in 1999. He is of particular renown for his pioneering work in non-linear time series.
The award will be presented at the Members Meetings at the JSM in San Diego on 1 August 2012.
Professor James Durbin (1923-2012)
The Department of Statistics is extremely saddened to report the death of Professor Emeritus James Durbin, who passed away on Saturday 23 June 2012, at the age of 88 years. Professor Durbin was a distinguished member of our department for nearly 40 years, joining LSE in 1950 and staying with us until his retirement in 1988. The recipient of the Guy Medal in Gold in 2008, he will be remembered for his considerable contributions to statistics, econometrics and time series analysis.
Details of a memorial event will follow shortly.
An obituary written by Professor Siem Jan Koopman for the Royal Statistical Society can be read here|. Siem Jan is a former colleague of our department and is now Professor of Econometrics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
LSE Teaching Prizes 2012
On Tuesday the 22nd May 2012 the Teaching and Learning Centre celebrated LSE’s teaching with the presentation of teaching prizes. We are proud to announce that staff from the Department of Statistics were among the prize winners. Dr Erik Baurdoux (right) was presented with a Major Review Award by the Pro-Director of Teaching and Learning, Professor Janet Hartley. Major Review Awards are given to academic staff whose individual performance from the start of contract through to Major Review is judged to be outstanding. Quality of teaching, innovative approaches and development of teaching excellence are all considered in light of feedback from both students and colleagues. Professor Hartley also presented Mai Hafez (middle) with a Departmental Class Teacher Award. These awards recognise the special contribution made by Graduate Teaching Assistants and guests teachers to LSE’s academic departments. The winners are nominated by the departments themselves as a result of exceptional feedback from students, lecturers and other department members. Georgios Zouros (left), who was nominated by the Mathematics department, also received an award and teaches along with Mai on our course ST102 (Elementary Statistical Theory).
Statistics PhD Presentation Event Prize for Research Poster
Our PhD candidate Edward Wheatcroft was awarded a prize of £100 by the department for his research poster Using shadowing ratios to evaluate data assimilation techniques, presented at the annual PhD Statistics Presentation Event, day two, on 11 May 2012.
Ed is pursuing his PhD in the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS). His PhD is supervised by Professor Leonard A Smith, the Director of CATS, and Dr David Stainforth, a Senior Research Fellow in CATS and the Grantham Research Institute.
Statistics PhD candidate awarded Deutsche Bank financial risk management and regulation prize
We are very pleased to announce that our PhD candidate Hongbiao Zhao has been awarded first prize in the Deutsche Bank Award in Financial Risk Management and Regulation 2012, hosted by the Financial Markets Group in LSE's Department of Finance.
Hongbiao has been awarded £10,000 for the most outstanding research paper, Portfolio credit risk of default and spread widening|.
Further details|.
Albert Shiryaev
The renowned mathematician Albert Nikolayevich Shiryaev| of the Steklov Mathematical Instititute in Moscow visited the Departmentv of Statistics between 20 January and 15 February 2012. During this visit, Professor Shiryaev gave six special two-hour lectures on specigic topics of stochastic calculus and its methods. Lecture slides can be viewed here| and here|. He also gave a seminar talk on 'The concept of randomness: evolution of notions'.
Professor Shiryaev is a distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Statistics.
Actuarial Science students awarded prize at the 2011-12 Worshipful Company of Actuaries guest lecture
The Department of Statistics was proud to host our annual guest lecture in conjunction with the Worshipful Company of Actuaries on Tuesday 22nd November 2011. This year's guest lecturer was David C Bowie, Partner and Head of Quantitative Analysis at Hymans Robertson and a Director of the Institute of Quantitative Investment Research (INQUIRE). David's talk was entitled "Enterprise risk management for actuaries: a paradigm shift or the emperor's new clothes?".
During the event the Master of the Worshipful Company of Actuaries presented two final year BSc Actuarial Science students with prizes for outstanding academic achievement in their 2nd year examinations. Kenneth Lim Chu Ming (left) and Kenneth Huanyi Zheng (right) do not only have a name in common; both have excelled in their studies during the first two years of their degree programme and this achievement was awarded by the Worshipful Company of Actuaries.
Department of Statistics partners nth International Forum of Statistics
The Department of Statistics is very pleased to announce that it is a partner at the 5th International Forum of Statistics, taking place on 14th and 15th July 2012 at the School of Statistics, Renmin University of China, in Beijing. Professor Qiwei Yao of our Time Series Group will be be one of the keynote speakers.
Please visit the conference website| for further details.
Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship awarded to H. P. Wynn
Professor Henry Wynn has been awarded an Emeritus Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust| to pursue a research project entitled Advances in algebraic statistics. The grant starts on 1 August 2011 for a period of 24 months. Professor Wynn is a leading figure in the UK in the area on the interface between statistics and computational algebraic geometry. The project will consolidate research in a number of sub-areas in which Professor Wynn is engaged with co-researchers in Italy, Spain and Japan, including the application of the theory of monomial ideals in reliability, experimental design and hierchical model structures.
Professor Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao
Department of Statistics seminar
Learning from numbers to generate new knowledge
The Department of Statistics is delighted to announce that Professor C. R. Rao|, one of the world's foremost statisticians, will be the distinguished speaker at a seminar in room NAB.1.04 in the New Academic Building on Tuesday 28 June 2011, starting at 2pm. An abstract of the talk is available here|.
Professor Rao is professor emeritus at Penn State University and research professor at the University of Buffalo. He is being awarded the Guy Medal in Gold| by the Royal Statistical Society in 2011.
Amongst his many other prestigious awards is the National Medal of Science|, awarded in 2002 for his theoretical work which helped to lay the foundation of modern statistics.
Please see here| for a map of the LSE campus, showing the location of the New Academic Building.
Please email Stats.Events@lse.ac.uk| for further details.