CANSSI Distinguished Postdoctoral Program—New!

CANSSI is introducing an updated postdoctoral program this year. The program has two phases. In the first phase, faculty are encouraged to submit proposals for two-year research and training projects. These proposals will be evaluated by CANSSI’s scientific advisory committee. Successful proposals will advance to the second stage. In the second stage, postdoctoral applicants can browse the available projects and send us their applications. After CANSSI's adjudication of candidates, successful candidates and potential faculty mentors will have two weeks to meet and evaluate the fellowship. The offer is fulfilled if both the mentors and the potential fellow accept.

The postdoctoral fellow salary will be $70,000 per year plus benefits. Most of the salary and benefits are provided by CANSSI, but the host institutions will contribute salary for teaching and supervisors/co-supervisors/interdisciplinary partners will contribute 1–4 months salary total over two years plus a modest research support budget.

Learn more about this new program on our website.

CANSSI National Seminar Series

Also new this year is the CANSSI National Seminar Series. There are three components to this program: the seminar, the student session, and the journal club. Anyone can register for the seminar and join us via Zoom. The student session following the seminar is a chance for students to interact with the speaker. They are encouraged to ask questions about the speaker’s research area, career, or the recommended paper. This session is moderated by Mamadou Yauck, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. He holds a PhD in Statistics from Université Laval. Mamadou’s work focuses on capture-recapture methods for marketing data, respondent-driven sampling, causal inference, and network data analysis.

The journal club is a separate component run at different institutions. At least two weeks before each seminar, the speaker will recommend a paper that will help people get the most out of the seminar. While everyone is encouraged to access the paper via the National Seminar Series website and to discuss the paper with colleagues, CANSSI particularly encourages graduate student involvement, and will provide a modest level of financial support for graduate-student focused journal clubs. The form of these journal clubs is not prescribed, and may vary, but to receive CANSSI funding, these must be focused on graduate students.

This fall features three talks highlighting Hidden Markov Models.

• Sept. 24—Ruth King, University of Edinburgh
• Oct. 22—Christopher Jackson, University of Cambridge
• Nov. 26—Maciej Augustyniak, Université de Montréal

Talks will continue in the winter/spring semester on the fourth Thursday of each month. The spring theme is causal inference.

We are grateful to the NSS committee for organizing these seminars for the 2020–21 academic year: Simon Bonner (chair), Gabriela Cohen-Freue, and Geneviève Lefebvre.

CANSSI Graduate Student Exchange Program

We have also updated our Graduate Student Exchange Program (CANSSI-GSES). This scholarship program is designed to foster acquisition of new knowledge and skill sets, provide exposure to new areas of research and application, encourage co-discovery of new statistical methodology, provide co-supervision of thesis research, and create new and/or strengthen existing collaborations. There are two variations:

1. Visiting Scholarships support master's and PhD students enrolled at one Canadian university to visit another Canadian university for an extended period of time (2–4 months).
2. Applied Immersion Scholarships support PhD students enrolled at a Canadian university to undertake an immersive interdisciplinary or applied experience with a sponsor outside of statistics.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis but must be received at least two months before the beginning of the proposed visit. Detailed information on the program and the application process is available online.