A great deal has happened since we last provided news from HEC in Liaison and are worthy of mention. Two of our colleagues are new chairholders: Aurélie Labbe is the inaugural recipient of the FRQ-IVADO Chair in Data Science and Laurent Charlin received a CIFAR-AI Chair. François Bellavance started his first mandate as Director of Academic Programs and is now weathering the storm caused by the pandemic with his usual dedication and skills. Among other recent news worthy of mention:

• Congratulations to Luc Villandré and David Ardia for their funded IVADO Covid-19 initiatives. I encourage you to have a look at the COVID-19 Data Hub, which aims to provide worldwide users with a unified data hub.
• Maxime Larocque, an MSc student in the business intelligence program supervised by Jean-François Plante and Michel Adès (UQAM), is the recipient of the Best Master Thesis Award for his work "Bagged Genetic Agorithms for Objective Variable Selection."
• Jian Tang received an Amazon Faculty Research Award and funding for collaborative work from Microsoft-Mila for his project "Towards Combining Statistical Relational Learning and Graph Neural Networks for Reasoning."
• Claudie Ratté-Fortin is the recipient of an IVADO postdoctoral scholarship for a project on machine learning for modelling extreme events.

The Department of Decision Sciences continues to expand: Juliana Schulz, David Ardia, and myself joined last summer and we are happy to welcome Dena Firoozi as assistant professor within our ranks starting June 1. Dena received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from McGill and is currently postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. She is specialized in optimal control, estimation theory and mean-field games with applications in financial engineering. Congratulations also to David Ardia for his promotion (with tenure) to associate professor. Information about other new hirings will be communicated in an upcoming issue.