Thais Rodrigues
We are thrilled to announce that PhD student Thais Rodrigues won the J.B. Douglas Award yesterday, at the Statistical Society of Australia's 17th annual J.B. Douglas Postgraduate Awards Day.

The event, held at the University of Technology, Sydney, featured presentations by nine selected PhD students from several NSW universities.

Thais' talk, Quantile pyramids for regression, stems from her PhD research under the supervision of Dr Yanan Fan which focuses on computational Bayesian statistics and Bayesian quantile regression. Thais' presentation was delivered confidently, and she fielded challenging audience member questions with ease. 

Our Head of Statistics, Associate Professor Spiro Penev, congratulated Thais for her win, which he said was "in a tough competition in a pool of nine competitors, and with a unanimous vote of the professional jury".  Thais Rodrigues

A/Prof Penev said that Thais' win "is an attestation for the high level of PhD research in Statistics conducted at UNSW". UNSW Statistics students have performed strongly in the J.B. Douglas prize in recent years: Boris Beranger (2014), Francis Hui (2013), Ian Renner (2011), and Gareth Peters (2009) are all past UNSW student winners. 

The J.B. Douglas Award commemorates the work of the late Jim Douglas, the first ever statistics appointment at UNSW. The Postgraduate Awards competition is an annual event organised by the NSW branch of the Statistical Society of Australia, open to competitors from all NSW universities for the best presentation of a PhD thesis in Statistics.

We warmly congratulate Thais for this fantastic achievement!