DSI Best Thesis Prize Awarded to Imperial Maths Student

The DSI has awarded its Best Thesis Prize to recent statistics PhD graduate Melissa Turcotte

The DSI has awarded its Best Thesis Prize, worth £3000, to recent PhD graduate Melissa Turcotte, who recently completed her PhD in Statistics at Imperial.

The Best Thesis Prize, sponsored by IBM, recognises an outstanding PhD thesis completed within the fields of data science or data-driven scientific research at Imperial College London.

The judging committee, chaired by Sofia Olhede, Professor of Statistics at UCL, felt Melissa’s thesis stood out amid a strong field of entries with her thesis titled: Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Networks.

“I wanted to monitor enterprise networks for cyber-security purposes,” explained Melissa, who now works as a Research Associate at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA. “Protecting cyber networks is becoming increasingly important and currently statistical methods are under-utilized for anomaly detection on these networks. There is a lot of research still to be done in analysing data within this domain but there is huge promise in using statistical models to identify compromises within enterprise networks.”

Two runner up prizes, worth £1000 each, were also awarded to Florian Rathgeber (Computing) for his submission, Productive and Efficient Computational Science Through Domain-specific Abstractions, and Michael Schaub (Maths), Unraveling complex networks under the prism of dynamical processes: relations between structure and dynamics. Since completing his PhD Michael has moved on to post-doctoral research in Belgium at the University of Namur, Florian is now working as a Computational Scientist for the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.