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News

Browse our recent news and activities

 Current news in 2023

The department enjoys a vibrant research environment and offers a comprehensive programme of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Statistics
class teacher awards 2023

May 2023: Class Teacher Award winners announced!

We are very proud to announce that the Department of Statistics had twelve class teachers who won awards at the ceremony on 11 May 2023!

Everyone in the Department of Statistics is so grateful to our amazing students for taking time to nominate our hard working and supportive teachers

Massive congratulations go out to the following teachers who won class teacher awards:

✨Xinyi Liu
✨Anica Kostic
✨Anastasia Kakou
✨Mingwei Lin
✨Yudong Chen
✨Tao Ma
✨Kaifang Zhou
✨Xuzhi Yang
✨Zezhun Chen
✨Sahoko Ishida
✨Qin Fang
✨Shakeel Gavoili-Akilagun

Take a look here for more information. 

Jialin

May 2023: Jialin Yi has been recommended for a PhD award

We are so pleased to announce that Jialin has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘Regret-minimization Algorithms for Multi-agent Cooperative Learning Systems’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Yi on his wonderful achievement and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career.

Eric New

May 2023: Dr. Erik Baurdoux is a Mental Health Staff Champion and shares his wellbeing tips!

It's Mental Health Awareness Week this week and Dr. Erik Baurdoux is featured in Staff News and discusses his role as a LSE Mental Health Champion! Erik finds there are many ways to help his wellbeing such as catching up with friends, riding his bike, watching Arsenal play and listening to gabber music. 

Erik says 'Please consider visiting the Mental Health Champions stall in the Shaw Café on Tuesday 16 May, from 12-2pm!' Mental Health Awareness Week is in full steam now, so please look at all the activities that LSE has to offer.  

Iulia Dumitras Photo1

April 2023: Warm welcome to a new member of the PSS team!

We are delighted to say that we have another new member of the PSS team! Iulia Dumitras joins us as our MSc Programmes Manager for a 12 month fixed term contract and we are very excited to have her in our team and to be a part of the LSE family.  

Ragvir Sabharwal200x200

April 2023: Ragvir Sabharwal has been recommended for a PhD award

We are so pleased to announce that Ragvir has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘On Factor Models for High-Dimensional Time Series’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Sabharwal on his wonderful achievement and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career.

montanapic

April 2023: Warm welcome to a new member of the PSS Team

We are delighted to say that we have a new member of the PSS team! Montana Tracey joins us as our permanant Office Assistant and we are very excited to have him in our team and to be a part of the LSE family.

Tengyao Wang 2021

March 2023: Dr. Tengyao Wang awarded the Guy Medal by the RSS

We are so incredibly proud of Dr. Tengyao Wang for being awarded the Guy Medal in Bronze by the Royal Statistical Society! The medal is awarded to Tengyao for his contributions to high-dimensional statistics, including changepoint estimation, dimension reduction and missing data. Huge congratulations!

ADRUK - logo

March 2023: New PhD Studentship - Assessing inequality in the Criminal Justice System 

We are delighted to be hosting one of new 20 studentships funded by ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) focusing on quantitative research using linked administrative data. 

The funded project, Assessing Inequality in the Criminal Justice System using statistical methods, will be supervised by Dr Sara Geneletti and Professor Fiona Steele

The application deadline is 27 April 2023.

Full details on the project and the PhD studentship is provided on our webpage

Filippo Pellegrino

March 2023: Filippo Pellegrino has been recommended for a PhD award

We are so pleased to announce that Filippo has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘Essays on asynchronous time series and related multidimensional data’

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Pellegrino on his wonderful achievement and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career.

Chengchun ShiYunxiao

March 2023: Dr. Yunxiao Chen and Dr. Chengchun Shi promoted to Associate Professors! 

The Department of Statistics would like to congratulate Chengchun Shi and Yunxiao Chen who have passed their major review and have been promoted to Associate Professor which will be effective from August 2023. It is a fantastic recognition of their talent and of how lucky we are to have them with us in the department! Huge congratulations to you both!  

Yiliu Wang_cropped

January 2023: Yiliu Wang has been recommended for a PhD award

We are so pleased to announce that Yiliu has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘Relational learning for set value functions’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Wang on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

GiuliaWeb

January 2023: Dr. Giulia Livieri's successful Innovation Challenge idea!

The Department of Statistics would like to congratulate Giulia Livieri for her successful application to the LSE Innovation Challenge! 

The innovation challenge is a call for LSE researchers to develop ideas based on their research to help meet the challenges faced by the world in a time of rapid change. It’s for all engaged in academic research across LSE's departments/centres – academic, research and policy staff.  This challenge is an opportunity for researchers to find a pathway to create a positive impact on the most important issues of our time. Read more about the LSE Innovation Challenge.
 
The LSE Innovation (LSEi) review panel decided that Giulia’s application has commercialisation potential and should be supported by the Innovation team. In addition, the panel has offered an award of £5,000 to Giulia to be used for market validation purposes. 

The summary of her venture idea is Climate Change, Uncertainty and Financial Risk: Robust Approaches based on Time-Varying Parameters. Giulia would like to develop novel econometric approaches to assess and manage climate risk in big financial portfolios in a robust, easily implementable, and flexible form. She will adopt the view that the parameters governing the impact of climate shocks on asset prices are latent and random, reflecting the uncertainty of future climate scenarios. Because climate-related shocks are non-stationary, she will allow for temporal variations in the parameters’ conditional distributions, and plans to construct dynamic models of different forms, e.g., time-series, cross-sections, and networks, describing the concentrations of climate risks in the portfolio and the firms’ time-varying exposure to such risks. By aggregating the latter at the portfolio or the financial system level, she will perform stress test and scenario analyses of systemic risk.

Huge congratulations, Giulia! 

Tomasz-Dubiel-Teleszynski

January 2023: Tomasz Dubiel-Teleszynski has been recommended for a PhD award

We are so pleased to announce that Tomasz has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘Bayesian Sequential Inference and Machine Learning Applied to Yield Curve Forecasting’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Dubiel-Teleszynski on his wonderful achievement and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career.

  
News Archive 2022 

December 2022
Anica Kostic has been recommended for a PhD award

Anica kostic 2022

We are so pleased to announce that Anica has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘On change-point perspectives in multiple testing and weak signal inference’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Kostic on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

December 2022
Qin Fang has been recommended for a PhD award

Qin_Fang_NEW1

We are so pleased to announce that Qin has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘High-dimensional functional data/time series: finite-sample theory, adaptive functional thresholding and prediction’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Fang on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

November 2022
Winton prize winners

winton_logofinal

We are pleased to announce that we have been kindly donated the following prizes by Winton. Our Head of Department Professor Pauline Barrieu would like to thank Winton for these donations and the Department of Statistics is extremely thankful for their continued support. A huge congratulations to the students who have worked hard and have been awarded the prizes below. 

Prize: Winton Prizes for Academic Excellence in Statistics with Financial Applications.
This prize will be awarded to two undergraduate Statistics students who have taken the Stochastics and Actuarial Methods in Finance course (ST330) and achieved the highest weighted average marks. Two prizes of £500 are awarded. 
Winner: JASPER WIBLIN, BSc Actuarial Science
Winner: SHAHZEB KHAN, BSc Actuarial Science

Prize: Winton Prize for Academic Excellence in MSc Data Science.
This prize will be awarded to the MSc Data Science student with the highest overall marks in their assessments. One prize of £500 is awarded.
Winner: MARTA RODRIGUEZ, MSc Data Science 

Prize: Winton Prize for Best Capstone Project in MSc Data Science.
This prize will be awarded to the group of MSc Data Science students with the highest overall mark in their Capstone Project. One prize of £500 is awarded(divided equally between the group members).
Winner: DEELAN GOPAUL, MSc Data Science
Winner: JOSIAH SUARTONO, MSc Data Science

Prize: Winton Prize for Academic Excellence in MSc Statistics/MSc Statistics (Financial Statistics) and MSc Statistics (Social Statistics).
This prize will be awarded to the student with the highest overall mark in their assessments. One prize of £500 is awarded.
Winner: XINYI WANG, MSc Statistics (Financial Statistics) 

Prize: Winton Prize for Best Dissertation in MSc Statistics/MSc Statistics (Financial Statistics)/MSc Statistics (Social Statistics).
This prize will be awarded to the student with the highest mark in their dissertation. One prize of £500 is awarded.
Winner: JIAYU LI, MSc Statistics (Financial Statistics) (Research)  

November 2022
Professor Yao awarded an EPSRC grant

Prof Qiwei Yao 200x200

Professor Qiwei Yao has been awarded an EPSRC grant on the topic "Network Stochastic Processes and Time Series (NeST)" for a duration of six years starting 1 December 2022!

Take a look at the Research grants webpage to find out more details of the award.

Many congratulations, Qiwei!

November 2022
MSc Data Science Capstone Projects are showcased in the EGI exhibition

Living in London

There is still time to visit the Educating for Global Impact (EGI) exhibition on the ground floor of the Marshall Building – until the end of the term. Our MSc Data Science capstone projects have been showcased there! Dr Marcos Barreto goes into detail below about the capstone projects and their aims. 

The capstone is a collaborative project, providing students with the opportunity to study and research in depth a data science problem proposed by an industry or academic partner. The problem will normally relate to data-based issues faced in practice by private or public sector organisations, requiring the use of specific data sources and data science skills learnt on the programme. The project is jointly supervised by an LSE faculty and company partner collaborators. It requires creative work in formulating research questions and hypotheses, identifying the most suited methodology, referring to research literature, analysing data sources using a variety of data science tools, and providing insights about the observed results and future directions. The students are able to develop and improve the hard and soft skills needed in most data science jobs.

The list of partners so far includes Microsoft, Tesco, Adobe, Facebook/Meta, Samsung, Alpha Telefónica, AstraZeneca, Capgemini, Koa Health, Siemens Advanta Consulting, Deutsche Bank, Agricom/Huggin Munin, Pareto Economics, ADIA, Google Research, Houghton Street Ventures, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, LSE Planning Division, Department of Methodology (LSE), Department of Government (LSE), Thames Valley Violence Reduction Unit, and The Open University.  

The topics covered by the projects span different areas, such as healthcare, finance, social sciences, logistics, agriculture, and environmental science. Some recent examples comprised i) forecasting of sea water transparency and monitoring of water pollution, ii) machine learning models applied to mental health interventions and monitoring of depression symptoms, iii) network/sentiment analysis applied to social media and company network data, iv) prediction models applied to supply chain and reorder point optimization, and v) use of alternative data in financial market forecasting. 

October 2022
Yan Lu has been recommended for a PhD award

Yan Lu_cropped

We are so pleased to announce that Yan has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘Multivariate Outlier Detection in Latent Variable Models’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Lu on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

October 2022
Congratulations to academic staff for their promotions

Congratulations

We are proud to announce that three of our academic members of staff have been promoted! Wicher Bergsma has been promoted to Professor and Yining Chen and Xinghao Qiao have passed Major Review and have been promoted to Associate Professor. Huge congratulations on these fantastic and well-deserved achievements! 

September 2022
Farewell to our External Engagement Officer

Joey Hoang 2021

Our External Engagement Officer Joey Hoang has left LSE for pastures new. We are very sad to see her go, but we wish you good luck on your new adventure, Joey!

August 2022
Excellence in Education Awards announced

excellence awards 2022

We are very proud to announce that we have many members of our academic and PS staff who have won LSE Excellence in Education Awards! A huge congratulations goes to Steven Ellis, Chengchun Shi, Erik Baurdoux, Sara Geneletti, Clifford Lam, Milan Vojnovic, Marcos Barreto, Daniela Escobar, Christine Yuen, Sarah McManus and Penny Montague! Details can be found here - https://info.lse.ac.uk/staff/education/Education-awards/LSE-Excellence-in-Education-Awards

August 2022
Marcos Barreto awarded runner-up prize in the Essays in Education Blog challenge!

M Barreto 2021

Marcos' submission to the Higher Education blog  was awarded a runner-up prize. Staff and students across the world were invited to enter submissions on several themes ranging from politics in the classroom to international students to the value of a university education. You can read more information about the Essays in Education Blog challenge.

Many congratulations, Marcos! 

August 2022
Goodbye to our Programmes Administrator

Alex Taylor 2021

Our Programmes Administrator Alex Taylor has left the Department of Statistics for pastures new. We are very sad to see Alex go, but we wish you luck on your new adventure and please keep in touch!

July 2022
Despoina Makariou has been recommended for a PhD award

Despoina_cropped

We are so pleased to announce that Despoina has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘Development and application of statistical learning methods in insurance and finance’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Makariou on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

July 2022
Tianlin Xu has been recommended for a PhD award

Tianlin-Xu

We are so pleased to announce that Tianlin has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘Generative Adversarial Networks for Sequential Learning’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Xu on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

June 2022
Professor Fiona Steele has been recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2022!

Fionanew

Fiona Steele has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to statistics in the social sciences.

Fiona's research in statistics is motivated by social science problems especially the methodological challenges in analysing longitudinal data and other types of social data with complex structure.  She has worked on a range of applications in demography, education, family psychology and health.

She first joined LSE in 1996 as Lecturer in Statistics and Research Methodology.  She then worked at the Institute of Education, University of London 2001-2005, followed by the University of Bristol 2005-2013 where she was Professor of Social Statistics and Director of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling. She returned to LSE in 2013.

Professor Steele was awarded the Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze in 2008 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009.  She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2011 for services to social sciences.

Commenting on her award, Professor Steele said:

“I am delighted to receive this honour and for the recognition it brings to the essential role played by statisticians in social research.  I have been fortunate to collaborate with and learn from many outstanding fellow social statisticians and social scientists throughout my career, and to benefit from the rich and supportive research environment in the Department of Statistics.”

Everyone in the Department of Statistics is very proud of you, Fiona!

May 2022
Dr. Barreto is a new editor for the International Journal of Population Data Science!

M Barreto 2021
We are excited to let you know that Dr. Marcos Barreto has joined the editorial board of the International Journal of Population Data Science! You can find out more about the editorial board which concentrates on “articles on all aspects of research, development and evaluation connected with data about people and populations”. This is an important journal around a community of researchers, practitioners, stakeholders etc involved in population-based data science. 

Congratulations Marcos on this amazing achievement!

April 2022
Cheng Chen has been recommended for a PhD award

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We are delighted to announce that Cheng has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘Autocovariance-based Statistical Inference for High-Dimensional Functional/Scalar Time Series’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Chen on his wonderful accomplishment and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career.

April 2022
Alexandra Tsimbalyuk has been recommended for a PhD award

Alexandra Tsimbalyuk

We are so pleased to announce that Alexandra has been recommended for the award of a PhD for her thesis, ‘Efficient estimation of present-value distributions for long-dated contracts and functionals in the multivariate case’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Tsimbalyuk on her wonderful achievement and wish her all the best for the next stage of her career.

April 2022
Konstantinos Vamvourellis has been recommended for a PhD award

Konstantinos Vamvourellis (1)

We are so pleased to announce that Kontantinos has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘Bayesian inference for latent variable modelling’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Vamvourellis on his wonderful achievement and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career.

March 2022
IMPSS 2022 Annual Meeting

Prof Irini Moustaki200x200

The IMPSS 2022 Annual Meeting takes place from 11-15 July in Bologna, Italty.  We are pleased to announce that our very own Professor Irini Moustaki is the current president of the psychometric society and she has been organising the meeting this year! 

You can find out more about the IMPSS 2022 Annual Meeting.

March 2022
Alexander Kreiss leaves LSE for pastures new!

Alexander Kreiss

Alexander has left the Department of Statistics and will be taking up a new position at Leipzig University in Germany! We are very sad to see him go, but we wish you good luck on your new adventure, Alexander!

March 2022
Marcos Barreto awarded Eden Centre Inclusive Education Action Plan Fellowship!

M Barreto 2021

We are very excited to announce that Dr. Marcos Barreto has been awarded an Eden Centre Inclusive Education Action Plan (IEAP) Fellowship! The aim of these fellowships is to support staff to undertake work on decolonising higher education within their disciplinary field.  The project led by Marcos will focus on data science teaching and assessment. Huge congratulations, Marcos! Details below.  

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Title: Decolonising Data Science teaching and assessment

This project focuses on two aspects related to data science education in light of decolonising: teaching and assessment. Is the way data science is taught adequate and inclusive, or is everyone forced to fit the same model? Do evaluative activities in data science teaching effectively measure students’ critical and innovative ability or purely their technical capacity to memorize and repeat the same solutions? Also, whether the assessment is guided by the instructor’s personal belief and experience in drawing “correct solutions” rather than students’ understanding of the problem and subsequent solution. These are some initial questions leading this study.

Key outcomes comprise i) identifying the origins of data science teaching – who has established this basic structure and based on which coloniality context; ii) checking whether teaching staff and students are aware of and concerned with these problems, and thus keen to (re)evaluate their beliefs and practices towards decolonising and inclusivity; and iii) serving as an initial discussion of practical actions towards decolonising data science teaching and assessment at the department level.

February 2022
Rico Blaser has been reccomended for a PhD award

Rico Blaser

We are so pleased to announce that Rico has been recommended for the award of a PhD for his thesis, ‘Random rotations in machine learning’.

On behalf of all in the Department of Statistics, we would like to congratulate Dr. Blaser on his wonderful achievement and wish him all the best for the next stage of his career. 

February 2022
Pauline Barrieu is the next Vice Chair of the Academic Board (VCAB)!

Prof Pauline Barrieu

The Academic Board has approved that Pauline will be taking on the role, alongside her role as the next Statistics Head of Department! The role of the VCAB is to act as an interlocutor and point of communication between the academic community, departments, the Directorate, the School Management Committee, and Council. Many congratulations to Pauline on this important appointment! 

February 2022
Chengchun Shi has been awarded an ESPRC grant!

Chengchun Shi

We are very pleased to announce that Chengchun has been awarded an EPSRC New Investigator grant. You can fnd out all about the grant here. Huge congratulations, Chengchun! 

January 2022
Meena Kotecha has achieved her PhD from the University of Cambridge!

Meena Kotecha200x200

Her PhD thesis is entitled “Mathematics anxiety in university students: investigating the efficacy of a blended learning intervention promoting interaction, inclusion, & collaboration”. Her doctoral research aimed to investigate the impact of an intervention she designed to tackle mathematics anxiety (MA) and understand, from students’ perspectives, the main reasons for the effectiveness of this intervention. The intervention was implemented in statistics courses for non-specialist  undergraduate students in a higher education (HE) institution in the United Kingdom (UK), during the academic year commencing in 2018. In total, 176 students from three courses participated in the study.  A multi-mixed methods research was conducted to assess the intervention’s impact on reducing reported MA and to understand the main reasons for its effectiveness. Results indicated a statistically significant reduction in the reported MA for students. Although the study was restricted to one HE institution, which limits the generalisability of results, the inclusion of participants according to gender and nationalities allowed for some diversity in perspectives.

Huge congratulations, Meena! 

 

 

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