Professor Wei Qian Receives the 2025 David G. Kendall Award for Young Researchers in Probability Theory

Professor Wei QIAN, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science

Professor Wei QIAN from the Department of Mathematics has been awarded the 2025 David G. Kendall Award for Young Researchers. This highly regarded award, jointly presented by the Bernoulli Society (BS) and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), recognises researchers who have demonstrated significant achievements and great potential in the fields of Mathematical Statistics and Probability Theory.

The selection committee of the award seeks out early-career researchers who not only show exceptional promise but have already made substantial contributions to their respective fields. For the 2025 edition, which specifically honoured excellence in Probability Theory, the committee noted the impressive depth of Professor Qian’s research, which spans several core areas of modern probability—including Brownian loop soups, the Gaussian free field, Liouville quantum gravity, and percolation theory. In light of this recognition, Professor Qian will be invited to deliver the Kendall Lecture at the upcoming Bernoulli conference.

Professor Wei Qian’s Profile

Professor Wei QIAN joined the Department of Mathematics at The University of Hong Kong in 2025 as an Associate Professor. She obtained her PhD in 2017 from ETH Zürich under the supervision of Fields Medallist Wendelin Werner. Following her doctoral studies, she served as a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College and a research associate at the University of Cambridge until 2020. She then held the position of Chargée de recherche at the CNRS (Laboratoire de Mathématiques d'Orsay, Université Paris-Saclay) before moving to Hong Kong, where she served as an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong from 2022 to 2025.

Professor Qian’s research focuses on random two-dimensional geometry, a modern area of probability theory, strongly motivated by mathematical physics and featuring conformally invariant structures. Her research has been published in leading international journals, including the Journal of the European Mathematical Society, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Journal de Mathématiques pures et appliquées, Annals of Probability, Probability Theory and Related Fields, Communications in Mathematical Physics, and Physical Review Letters. Beyond her research, she is an active educator who has taught advanced mathematics courses, in particular probability, across leading institutions in Europe and Hong Kong.

Click here for more details about the award.