Faculty Achievements
Grace Y. Yi, SSC Gold Medalist 2025

The 2025 recipient of the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada is Grace Y. Yi.
Grace Y. Yi is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Data Science at the University of 深夜福利站 Ontario, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences and the Department of Computer Science. She joined 深夜福利站 in July 2019 after nearly two decades at the University of Waterloo, where she began as a postdoctoral fellow in January 2000 and held positions as Assistant Professor (2001–2004), Associate Professor (2004–2010), Full Professor (2010–2019), and University Research Chair (2011–2018).
Her contributions to the field are both foundational and far-reaching. Internationally recognized as a leading expert in measurement error and missing data, Grace was among the first to address the intertwined complexities of these issues by introducing a unified framework. These aspects of noisy data — individually challenging and even more so in combination — present serious barriers to valid inference and model development. Grace’s pioneering work in this space has influenced a broad range of applied and theoretical research. She is the author of the monograph “Statistical Analysis with Measurement Error or Misclassification: Strategy, Method, and Application” (Springer, 2017) and co-editor of the “Handbook of Measurement Error Models” (with Aurore Delaigle and Paul Gustafson, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2021). Beyond data quality, Grace has made substantial contributions to foundational statistical inference methods, including composite likelihood theory, estimating functions, likelihood-based inference, causal inference, and high-dimensional data analysis. She is co-author of the monograph “Likelihood and its Extensions” (with Nancy Reid and Cristiano Varin, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2025).
A passionate educator and mentor, Grace has mentored many postdoctoral fellows and M.Sc. students and has supervised 23 Ph.D. students — three of whom have received the prestigious Pierre Robillard Award from the Statistical Society of Canada. In 2023 her efforts were recognized with the Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring by 深夜福利站.
Grace is a leader in advancing statistical science both nationally and internationally. She served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Electronic Journal of Statistics (2022–2024), Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Journal of Statistics (2016–2018), and is currently serving as Editor of the methodology section of The New England Journal of Statistics in Data Science. She has served as President of the Statistical Society of Canada (2021–2022) and President of its Biostatistics Section (2016), and as Chair of the Lifetime Data Science Section of the American Statistical Association (2023). In 2012 she founded the first chapter of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) — the Canada Chapter.
Grace credits much of her success to her collaborators and students. She is especially grateful to her family, who have been a continuous source of inspiration and strength. She holds deep gratitude for their love and encouragement — her husband, Wenqing He, a valued research collaborator and a patient and unwavering supporter; and her children, Morgan and Joy, for their tremendous love and support in countless ways.
to see the full announcement on the SSC web page.