G-Research is committed to supporting early careers researchers in Maths and Data Science across the UK, Europe and beyond.
To that end, we run a series of PhD prizes every year where researchers at some of the world’s leading academic institutions are invited to submit PhD draft dissertations for the chance to win up to £10,000.
We’re thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s University of Oxford PhD prize:
First place: Chao Zhang
Receives £10,000
“I am a final year DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford and my research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, quantitative finance, and financial econometrics. Specifically, my work focuses on the simulation of market scenarios, multi-asset modelling of market impact and cross-impact, modelling and forecasting of market volatility and covariance matrices, and related topics.
“The G-Research prize will provide crucial support for my research, particularly through funding for international conference attendance and visits to collaborate with other experts in my field. These opportunities can help me to establish valuable new partnerships and collaborations, as well as to learn from other researchers and gain fresh insights.
“Overall, I hope that my research will ultimately contribute to a more complete understanding of financial markets, and to the development of more precise and effective forecasting tools.”
Joint second place: Jared Duker Lichtman
Receives £4,000
“I find it irresistible how subtle patterns emerge from basic multiplication. In my research, I am interested in multiplicative structure broadly interpreted, including primitive sets, multiplicative functions, sieve methods, and especially prime numbers.
“The G-Research prize will help support my travel to conferences and research trips to meet with colleagues.”
Joint second place: Shehreyar Zaidi
Receives £4,000
“I am broadly interested in deep learning, with the aims of understanding its fundamentals and using it to build high performance systems to solve problems.
“Topics I’ve worked on range from how we can improve generalization and efficiency of neural networks, to how such models can be made more robust and uncertainty-aware. I have also worked on applying these techniques to scientific problems, such as modelling physical systems and molecular property prediction.
“I’m excited and grateful to receive the G-Research PhD Prize, which will support me in the final stretch of my PhD towards thesis submission.”
Congratulations to all of our winners!
Interested in finding funding for your research?
Alongside our PhD prizes in maths and data science, G-Research runs a monthly grant for early careers researchers, where you can receive up to £2,000 in funding.