Patrick S C Poon Professorship in Statistics and Actuarial Science

Prior to 1967, the discipline of statistics only existed as a special teaching unit within the Department of Mathematics, with a senior lecturer and a lecturer. It subsequently joined the new Faculty of Social Sciences as an independent unit before being upgraded to the Department of Statistics in 1968.

Then in 1998 its name was changed to the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, becoming the first department with this name in Asia and in the Greater-China region. Since 1999, its mission has been to become a top research-led department at an international level. In 2004, the Department moved to the Faculty of Science, and in 2011 it was designated a Centre of Actuarial Excellence by the US Society of Actuaries for a period of five years, with the status renewed for another five years.

Professor Yin Guosheng is the Head and Professor of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), and is also the Patrick S C Poon Professor in Statistics and Actuarial Science.

Professor Yin’s main research areas cover clinical trial methodology, adaptive design, big data, machine learning, Bayesian methods, change-point analysis, and survival analysis. Specifically, one of his key research fields is on developing innovative statistical methods for clinical trials as these are becoming more complicated due to strict procedures and regulations, and costly in terms of time and funding.

To expedite drug development and enhance precision medicine, Professor Yin has developed numerous novel statistical methods and adaptive designs for clinical trials, including phase I dose-finding methods and drug-combination studies. The statistical methods, regression models and computational algorithms that arose from his cutting-edge research have generated enormous impact in the advancement of statistical modelling and theories. More recently, his research focus has expanded toward machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Professor Yin received his PhD in Biostatistics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. He worked as Assistant Professor (2003-08) and Associate Professor (2009) in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He joined HKU as an Associate Professor in 2009, and was promoted to Professor in 2014.

He has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier statistical journals such as the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Statistics, and Biometrika, as well as in leading medical journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Journal of the National Cancer Institute. He has written one book in English, Clinical Trial Design: Bayesian and Frequentist Adaptive Methods, and co-authored another in Chinese, Statistical Methods for Clinical Trials.

Professor Yin was among the world’s top 1% of scientists ranked in one of the 22 subject fields of Thomson Reuters according to Essential Science Indicators in 2015. He was elected as a Member of the International Statistical Institute in 2012 and as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2013.

He received the James E Grizzle Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Biostatistics, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been invited to be the keynote speaker at multiple international workshops and meetings, and has given over 100 invited talks. Professor Yin has also served as Associate Editor for numerous journals including Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, Japanese Journal of Statistics and Data Science, Journal of American Statistical Association, Contemporary Clinical trials, and Bayesian Analysis.