Graduate student seminars: by graduate students for graduate students

While the department has its own seminar series, the graduate students at UBC statistics also run their own seminars, which have a much more relaxed and informal tone. There’s always free food for all attendees!

These seminars provide an ideal opportunity for current graduate students to practice research presentations in a friendly environment. We also frequently invite alumni that are working in the industry to share their job-hunting and post-academic experience.

New this year: Career Fireside Chat

We are excited to announce the launch of a new Career Fireside Chat series of seminars in addition to our regular Research series of seminars. This brand new career panel is designed to build bridges between our graduate students who are eager to learn more about diverse statistics-related career paths and other graduate students who have had tangible experience working in industry.

During each of the Career Fireside chats, we will invite experienced speakers who are current or former graduate students in the Department of Statistics to share their career paths with you. The format for these events will include a brief overview of each speaker’s experience, highlighting their key milestones and lessons learned in their role. After the speaker’s introduction, we invite the audience to participate in an engaging Q&A session with the speaker to ask questions and seek advice directly from our speakers. Please bring your questions!

Seminars this year

The seminars will be in-person for the 2023–2024 academic year, but they will also be broadcast through Zoom.

Here is a list of previous and future seminars:

• March 27, 2024: Managing Personal Finances in Canada by Kenny Chiu
• Feb 16, 2024: Coreset Markov Chain Monte Carlo by Naitong Chen
• Feb 7, 2024: Career Fireside Chat with Johnny Xi, current PhD student at UBC Stats and former Machine Learning Intern at Valence Labs
• Nov 21, 2023: autoMALA: Locally adaptive Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm by Miguel Biron-Lattes
• Nov 02, 2023: Variance-Reduced Stochastic Optimization for Efficient Inference of Hidden Markov Models by Evan Sidrow
• Oct 19, 2023: Navigating the Canadian Health System as a UBC Graduate Student by Gian Carlo Diluvi

Interested in presenting at a graduate seminar? We are always looking for presenters! If you are interested, contact the graduate seminar organizers.

Calendar of upcoming seminars:

Last updated: March 22, 2024