Announcements

Scholarships of at least $1,000 each are given annually to one or more undergraduate students in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics who submit a one-page essay describing a mental health challenge they faced/are facing and what they learned/are learning through the experience. The essay should address activities that the student has participated in, such as: leadership, tutoring, peer mentoring, advocacy or self-care, which demonstrate how they have worked/are working on overcoming these challenges. Students with a GPA of 6.0 or higher will normally be considered. Selection of the recipients will be made by the Senate Committee on Awards. If one recipient from each Department is not possible in a given year, then two recipients from one Department may be selected.​

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Victoria invites applications for an Assistant Teaching Professor position, with eligibility for Continuing Status, to commence August 1, 2022, or as soon as possible after that date. The Faculty and Librarian Collective Agreement has provisions for the eventual promotion of Teaching Stream faculty members into a tenured position.

Don Sin of UBC and Xuekui Zhang of UVic has received $540,000 in funds from MITACS Accelerate for their project “Cellular Phenotyping Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: From Microbes to Epithelial and Macrophages”.

The UVic Department of Mathematics and Statistics, in conjunction with the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, is pleased to announce an exciting new program for high school students. IMAGINING UVic (Inspiring Mathematical Growth and Intuition in Girls) is a summer camp and seminar series aimed at encouraging young women to pursue STEM fields.

Three mathematicians, including UVic's Jonathan Noel, show, for the first time, how to form a square with the same area as a circle by cutting them into interchangeable pieces that can be visualized.

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Hari M. Srivastava for being named once again a Web of Science Group (Clarivate Analytics) Highly Cited Researcher for 2021. Very few researchers earn this distinction and Srivastava has been named six times, having done so previously in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. 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.

Laura Cowen of the University of Victoria discusses a new study finding that the number of COVID cases in northern B.C. and the province more generally are likely 2 to 6 times higher than what's being reported.

ILAS (International Linear Algebra Society) has announced that Pauline van den Driessche (UVic) and Nick Higham (University of Manchester, UK) are to receive the 2022 Hans Schneider Prize. The Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra is awarded by ILAS for research, contributions, and achievements at the highest level of Linear Algebra. This prize may be awarded for an outstanding scientific achievement or for lifetime contribution.

Congratulations to Cedric Beaulac, who has been awarded a CANSSI Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship and will be working on Genetic Correlates of Alzheimer’s Disease Subtypes at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Farouk Nathoo, Jiguo Cao and Mirza Faisal Beg

Congratulations to all our spring 2021 graduating students, including Etienne Leclerc, winner of the Governor General's Silver Medal for top undergraduate student, and Yakov Shklarov, winner of the Jubilee Medal - Science.

Pauline van den Driessche was among one of seven extraordinary individuals to receive an honorary degree from UVic. van den Driessche is an internationally renowned scientist who has made significant contributions in different areas of mathematics, revolutionizing the understanding of disease dynamics. Her work applies to topics such as multicity disease dynamics, HIV/AIDS control and West Nile virus outbreak predictions. Congratulations!

UVic Statistics professor Xuekui Zhang has received funding from GenomeBC to study how chronic obstructive pulmonary disease changes immune cell populations.

UVic Math & Stats students Alexandra Deane, Shannon Ogden and Danielle Tsao have been awarded Canadian Mathematical Society Excellence Scholarships. There are 12 awards available nationally for 2021 and the three students we nominated all won. Congratulations!

The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) honours the memory of Dr. Alfonso Gracia-Saz, who was to receive the CMS Award for Teaching Excellence later this summer. Dr. Gracia-Saz was a teaching professor in our department and the Learning and Teaching Centre before moving on to the University of Toronto. He left quite an impact while he was here and he will be missed by his former colleagues.

Chris Bruce PhD Victoria 2020 was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF) starting next year. It is for two years, and will be taken up at the University of Glasgow (after the completion of his Banting Fellowship with Queen Mary University of London).