The Department Awards Committee is pleased to announce that the winners of the 2023-2024 Marshall Prize are David Zuheng Xu and Daniel Daly-Grafstein.
David Xu was in the Statistics MSc program from 2018-2020 and has been in the PhD program since 2020, and he has been supervised by Trevor Campbell. David already has 6 conference papers and 2 journal papers. David has been self-motivated and developed many research ideas on his own. He has
a Best Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Bayesian Statistical Science for his Master's thesis work. David actively participates in multiple reading groups in the Statistics department. He is talented in mathematics and coding, and has pioneered an approach – called MixFlows – that has the tractability benefits of variational Bayes methods.
Daniel Daly-Grafstein entered the Statistics PhD program in Fall 2020 and has been supervised by Paul Gustafson. For his PhD research, he has a published paper in Biometrics and another under review, and has developed additional independent research. Further to Daniel's credit, he has done considerable "outside" statistical work. He has worked as a statistician in a research group led by Dr. John Staples (VCH Research Institute, UBC Internal Medicine). He has been working with "Foundations for Social Change" and worked for a group doing research on homelessness (research publication in PNAS and magazine article in The Conversation in September 2023 plus UBC Alumni Magazine Fall 2023).
Congratulations to David and Daniel!
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