Announcements

Over the course of her life, mathematician Betty Kennedy contributed to the University of Victoria and the community in so many ways that to a non-mathematician they may seem countless. It is fitting with so much of the generosity that characterized her life that in her passing in 2019, Kennedy bestowed UVic with a $3.6-million gift.

Dr. Laura Cowen, principal investigator and associate professor in UVic’s department of mathematics and statistics, is leading a team of researchers working to develop a tool that aims to find hidden COVID-19 cases in the community. (Provided by the Victoria Hospitals Foundation)

Here are some useful links for UVic students taking courses remotely.

Chris Bruce has been awarded a NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship based on the strength of his PhD thesis. This is NSERC’s most prestigious postdoctoral award and there were only 23 Banting Fellows awarded in Science and Engineering across all of Canada. Chris is the only Banting Fellow of 2020 in Mathematics. Chris will hold his Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London.

UVic Master's student in statistics, Yang (Simon) Guo received the VADA student research presentation award. This award is selected by a VADA committee for talks from students during the 2020 VADA summer school. The talks presented the students' research progress/findings while being supported by a VADA fellowship.

Congratulations to Joseph Horan, who is the recipient of an Andy Farquharson Teaching Excellence Award for Graduate Students for 2020. This University-wide award recognizes graduate students who make an outstanding contribution through their teaching in their home department. Joseph has played an extensive teaching role in the department, serving in the Assistance Centre, as a tutor, teaching a section of MATH 101, and then developing and teaching his own course as part of his President’s Fellowship in Research-Enriched Teaching.

Our recent PhD graduate, Dr Mark Piraino, is the recipient of the 2019 Governor General’s Gold Medal. This University-wide award is given in recognition of an outstanding dissertation. Mark was co-supervised by Professor Anthony Quas and Professor Chris Bose and his research is in dynamical systems and ergodic theory. He currently holds a prestigious Ralph Boas Assistant Professorship at Northwestern University. Congratulations Mark!

UVic math professor Junling Ma is on a team of researchers receiving a grant from the CIHR to model COVID-19.

Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) is hosting “Diversity in Math”, a two-week outreach summer program devoted to enhancing the presence of under-represented groups in STEM fields. All eligible students from Canadian universities are encouraged to apply.

Congratulations to the 2018-2019 Faculty of Science award recipients. - Teaching Excellence: Mary Lesperance, Mathematics and Statistics - Research Excellence: John Burke, Biochemistry and Microbiology - Staff Excellence: Carol Anne Sargent, Mathematics and Statistics The awards will be handed out at the Faculty of Science awards reception on November 28th.

Congratulations to Aaron Slobodin (middle), a Master's student in Math at UVic who won one of the three awards in the AARMS - CMS Student Poster Session at the 2019 CMS Winter Meeting.

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Hari M. Srivastava for being named once again a Web of Science Group (Clarivate Analytics) Highly Cited Researcher for 2019. Very few researchers earn this distinction and Srivastava has been named four times, having done so previously in 2015, 2017 and 2018. A Highly Cited Researcher has published multiple highly cited papers, defined as papers ranking in the top 1% by citation, considering both year and field of publication, during the last decade.

It is a great honour for the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematical Society to present the 2019 Research Prize to Prof. Pauline van den Driessche from the University of Victoria. The award is given in recognition of their contributions to Mathematical Epidemiology and Matrix Analysis, and the high impact of this work in many areas of Applied Mathematics more generally.