Thais Rodrigues wins EJG Pitman Prize at the Australian Statistical Conference
Published on the 09 Dec 2016
We are excited to report that our PhD student Thais Rodrigues has just won another award for a Statistics student presentation.
Hot on the heels of her 2016 J.B. Douglas Award, won a mere fortnight ago, she was announced the winner of the EJG Pitman Prize at the close of the Australian Statistical Conference last night. The EJG Pitman Prize is awarded for the most outstanding talk presented by a ‘young statistician’.
Thais has become one to watch - in June, she won the School's award for "Best Statistics Student Presentation" at our annual Postgraduate Conference. She is currently completing her PhD under the supervision of Dr Yanan Fan, with a focus on computational Bayesian statistics and Bayesian quantile regression.
In congratulating Thais, Head of UNSW Statistics A/Prof Spiro Penev praised her for her "hat-trick" of wins, won at the "School level, at State level and now at the National level".
Our former Honours Student Georgia Tsambos, who is now undertaking a Masters at the University of Melbourne, took out the runner-up prize.
Presentations for the EJG Pitman Prize are assessed via the motivation and setting of the general context; the organisation and structure of the talk; the originality of the substance of the talk; and the presentation of the material and rapport with the audience.
A/Prof Penev said that the participation and presentation of the UNSW Statistics Department at the conference was "very impressive, with a lot of invited talks, and also a lot of oral and poster presentations". Several School members delivered presentations over the course of the five-day conference, including Scott Sisson, Boris Beranger, Gery Geenens, Guilherme Rodrigues, Gordana Popovic, Jakub Stoklosa, Wesley Brooks, and David Warton.
The Australian Statistical Conference is run by the Statistical Society of Australia, and this year it was held in conjunction with the 14th Australasian Data Mining Conference and the 9th Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics.
We warmly congratulate Thais for her latest win!