The Dutch Society for Statistics and Operations Research (VVSOR) has awarded the Jan Hemelrijk Award to Joshua Rooijakkers, an alumnus of Erasmus School of Economics, in recognition of an outstanding master’s thesis in statistics or operations research. The prize consists of a certificate and €1,000.
Efficient and resilient modeling of correlated responses.
Joshua Rooijakkers completed his master’s degree cum laude in Econometrics & Management Science in 2025. His award-winning thesis, “Multi-Output Robust and Conjugate Gaussian Processes,” tackles the challenge of dealing with outliers (unusual data points that differ significantly from the rest of the data) when modelling multiple variables at once. Such outliers are present in many real-world datasets and often cause existing models to break down. To address this, Joshua introduces a new statistical method that reduces the influence of outliers, while making fast and accurate predictions. He validated this approach using real-world cancer drug response data, a setting where outliers frequently appear and computational speed is crucial.
According to thesis supervisor Prof. Dick van Dijk, Joshua has written a thesis of exceptional quality: ‘It reflects his creativity, analytical skills, and his ambition to excel in statistical and econometric research.’
Rooijakkers, who is deeply honoured with the Jan Hemelrijk Award, is currently working as a researcher at the University of Hong Kong. In his absence, Joshua’s father accepted the award on Thursday, 5 March.
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For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media & Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, +316 53 641 846.
