RSFAS is very pleased to announce that Xiaoyang Xu ("Zack") was awarded the University Medal for his 2017-2018 Honours thesis in Statistics for his dissertation entitled: Extremal Behaviours of Generalised Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Processes with Regularly Varying Tails.
The University Medal "recognises students who have obtained First Class Honours ... and demonstrated exceptional academic excellence across their studies." Xiaoyang's was one of only 7 University Medals awarded in 2018.
Among other comments an examiner of Xiaoyang's thesis reported: "... Xiaoyang Xu has produced a high quality honours thesis on the tail and extremal behaviour of stationary solutions to stochastic recurrence relations andgeneralised Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes.... Most impressively, the thesis contains original research, adapting existing methods to extend the Grincevicius-Grey conditions in the continuous time case and provides a new proof regarding the extremal behaviour of generalised Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes under weaker assumptions. The thesis is technical and adeptly tackles a mathematically challenging problem... It is an excellent thesis."
Besides his Statistics degree, Xiaoyang also completed a Bachelor of Finance degree from the ANU, majoring in Quantitative Finance, in 2017. In addition to his University Medal, Xiaoyang Xu was also awarded a Director of Science Education Commendation in 2014. His resume includes an internship in the Quantitative and Global Investment Department of GF Asset Management, a major Chinese asset management firm in Guangzhou, China (summer of 2016).
Xiaoyang is currently enrolled in the Master of Science in Computational Finance at Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School Of Business.
Xiaoyang's Honours thesis was supervised by Assoc. Prof. Boris Buchmann and Prof. Ross Maller. RSFAS and the ANU are very proud of Xiaoyang's achievements and congratulate him warmly on his accomplishments.