Nikola Surjanovic: 2021 Vanier Scholar

Congratulations to alumnus Nikola Surjanovic for being named a 2021 Vanier Scholar!

The Vanier Scholarship is a prestigious award given to students who are pursuing doctoral studies in Canada and who demonstrate leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement.

The title of Nikola's research proposal is Scalable Bayesian Methods for Sampling From Complex Probability Distributions. He is interested in the application of Bayesian statistical methods to address a wide range of challenging problems in society, such as fighting forest fires, detecting diseases, and managing natural resources. Such methods often require substantial computing power and time. As the problems that society tries to address become increasingly complicated and as the amount of available data continues to grow, Bayesian approaches can become impractical. Nikola's research will find efficient and novel ways of dealing with Big Data and complex Bayesian statistical problems by building upon newly-emerging tools and developing new ones.

Nikola completed his B.Sc. in Statistics at SFU in Summer 2019 and completed his M.Sc. in Statistics at SFU in Spring 2021. He will be pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, where he will be working under the supervision of Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Trevor Campbell.

We wish him all the best!