The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is a top-tier academic unit among statistical and actuarial science globally. Our community is engaged in topics such as actuarial science, biostatistics, data science, quantitative finance, statistics, & statistics-computing. Our department is home to 70 full-time faculty researching diverse and exciting areas, over 2000 undergraduate students from around the world, and approximately 200 graduate students in master, doctoral, and professional programs.
News
University of Waterloo Students Win First Place in 2025 SOA Student Research Case Study Challenge
The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science proudly celebrates the remarkable first-place victory by a team of its students, Team Factuarial, in the prestigious 2025 Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute Student Research Case Study Challenge. Team Factuarial members include Math/BBA double-degree students Ki Yan Chan and William Zhang and software engineering student Kevin Jiang, along with faculty advisor Dr. Ben Feng from the Statistics and Actuarial Science Department. The annual challenge invites students to apply their actuarial expertise to real-world business problems, conducting analyses, developing models, and presenting recommendations to a panel of judges from the SOA Research Institute. Competing against 278 students in 68 teams from 42 universities across 17 countries and six continents, Team Factuarial secured the top honour and a grant prize in 2025.arial science and emerge as leaders in the field.”
Students dive into data at 2025 ASA DataFest
From May 2–4, the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science hosted the 2025 American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest: an international data analysis challenge where teams of undergraduates work intensively to “find and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex data set.” This year, 130 students across 30 teams started the competition, with only 17 teams able to complete DataFest’s rigorous 48-hour challenge.
The winning teams were:
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Best Insight: Huatieloo Data Masters
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Best Use of External Data: BBGS
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Best Visualization: Team B
Liyuan Lin, 2025 Pierre Robillard Award Winner
Read the full announcement on the SSC website.
Congratulations Liyuan Lin, winner of the 2025 Pierre Robillard Award from the Statistical Society of Canada for her PhD thesis, "Measures for risk, dependence and diversification,". Her work, completed at the University of Waterloo, focused on quantitative risk management, introduces a novel diversification index and spans finance, actuarial science, and statistics, demonstrating both theoretical depth and practical impact. Lin is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Business School at Monash University, Australia.