Great news for the alumni of the Department of Finance and Statistics of School of Management: Yuan Ming (93 SCGY, Special Class for Gifted Youth), Yao Fang (9617), and Yu Jianfeng (9617) have been awarded multiple international prizes in the fields of Statistics and Finance.

Yuan Ming was honored by the Royal Statistical Society of UK with the Guy Medal in Bronze for his outstanding contribution regarding the issues of Statistical Inference for High-Dimensional Data, Machine Learning, and Nonparametric Estimation and Semi-parametric Estimation.

The Guy Medals were named after William Guy, the world famous physicist and statistician to mark excellent performance of statisticians of extraordinary accomplishment in the area. The Guy Medal in Bronze usually awarded young statisticians under the age of 35. Yuan was the first Chinese to won the prize.

Yuan was born in 1978. Admitted in the USTC department of SCGY of class 1993, he graduated with his master’s degree majoring in Probability and Statistics in 2000 from the SOM of USTC. He continued his education abroad with a master’s degree in Computer Science at Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, and a PhD in Statistics at the same university. He won multiple prizes such as:

Coca-Cola Junior Professorship, School of ISyE, Georgia Tech;
CAREER Award, DMS, National Science Foundation;
Distinguished Cancer Scholar, Georgia Cancer Coalition;
John van Ryzin Award, ENAR.

Yao Fang was given an award by the Statistical Society of Canada, the 2014 CRM-SSC Prize in Statistics, for his fundamental, influential, and pioneering research in area of Functional Data Analysis; his profound accomplishment in the exploration of the relation between Longitudinal Data and Functional Data; and his creative and successful application of the classic Nonparametric Estimation in FDA research.

This award is usually given to individuals with extraordinary contribution to the discipline, who graduated from their Ph.D. programs within 15 years.

Yao was born in 1978. As an alumnus of the Department of Statistics and Finance of the USTC SOM, he then furthered his education at UC Davis, and graduated with his doctoral degree in Statistics. He now works as a professor in the University of Toronto, Canada.

Yu Jianfeng was awarded the Smith Breeden first prize by the American Finance Association, for his published paper entitled Technological Growth and Asset Pricing, (joint with Nicolae Garleanu and Stavros Panageas), Journal of Finance, 67, August 2012, pp. 1265-1292.

The Smith Breeden Prize is an annual prize given to authors with the best finance research papers published in the Journal of Finance in any area other than corporate finance.

Yu had previously won many awards and multiple prizes in Finance, including:
Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA) Academic Competition, Third Prize, 2014;
4th Annual TCFA Best Paper Award, 2013;
Crowell Memorial Prize (Third Prize), PanAgora Asset Management, 2013;
Annual Faculty Research Award, Carlson School of Management, 2012;
Smith-Breeden Prize (First Prize), 2012;
Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q-Group) Research Award, 2012;
Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA) Academic Competition, First Prize, 2012;
3rd Annual TCFA Best Paper Award, 2012;
Inaugural AQR Insight Award, honorable mention, 2012;
RWC Marshall Blume Prize, honorable mention, 2011.

Yu was born in 1982. He graduated from the Department of Statistics and Finance, the Class of 1996. He studied Statistics at Yale University during 2000-2003. He received his doctoral degree in Finance of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He now is a professor in the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.