Each year, CANSSI funds multiple postdoctoral fellowships to provide career-building experience to recent PhDs in statistical sciences.
The fellowships, worth $70,000 per year over two years, are notable for the comprehensive training they provide. Recipients are jointly supervised by two professors from different universities and receive opportunities for interdisciplinary or applied collaboration, teaching, and professional development, as well as participating in a major research project.
For 2025, CANSSI is funding two CANSSI Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowships, one CANSSI Ontario Postdoctoral Fellowship in Statistical Sciences (in partnership with CANSSI Ontario), and one CANSSI-StatLab Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship (in partnership with the Centre de recherches mathématiques Statistics Laboratory (CRM StatLab)).
We are pleased to announce—and congratulate!—the following recipients:
- Chong Gan has been awarded a CANSSI Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. Chong completed her PhD in statistics at the University of Guelph in 2025 and is currently a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Guelph. She will be co-supervised by Professor Yingwei (Paul) Peng (Queen’s University) and Professor Cindy Feng (Dalhousie University) as she works on “Novel Statistical Models for Survival and Count Outcomes Using a Copula-based Approach and Their Applications in Health Research.” Read more about Chong and her research.
- Marouane Il Idrissi has been awarded a CANSSI Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. Marouane completed a PhD in statistics at the Université de Toulouse III in 2024 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He will work on “Explainability and Interpretability of Black-box Models” under the co-supervision of Professor Arthur Charpentier (UQAM) and Professor Marie-Pier Côté (Université Laval). Read more about Marouane and his research.
- Ruixuan Zhao has been awarded a CANSSI Ontario Postdoctoral Fellowship in Statistical Sciences. Ruixuan completed her PhD in data science at the City University of Hong Kong in 2024 and is currently a Research Assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She will participate in research aimed at “Discovering Causal Patterns in Network-linked Data through Bayesian Networks” under the co-supervision of Professor Linbo Wang (University of Toronto) and Professor Guowen Huang (Western University). Read more about Ruixuan and her research.
- Jake Spertus has been awarded a CANSSI-StatLab Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. Jake completed his PhD in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024 and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the same institution. His research focus will be “Detection of Offline and Online Change-points with Applications in Public Health and Finance” under the co-supervision of Professor Bouchra Nasri (Université de Montréal) and Professor Yunhong Lyu (Trent University). Read more about Jake and his research.
