AARMS is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s AARMS Graduate Scholarships. Congratulations to both.
Rylo Ashmore received her PhD from Memorial University in 2025 for their work on the novel pursuit-evasion game of Cat Herding. From the mathematics of juggling to puzzles, her interest in mathematics was cultivated from a young age. Outside of her thesis, she has done novel work with the research group at Memorial University on combinatorial games, as well as work with the LogicA lab in Rennes combining graph theory with computational automata. After graduating she has started working in industry where she is able to apply the mathematical principles she picked up during her PhD thesis as well as the computer science skills honed during her master’s thesis.
Wensha Zhang recently completed her PhD in Statistics at Dalhousie University, supervised by Dr. Toby Kenney and Dr. Lam Si Tung Ho. Her doctoral research, “Evolutionary Shift Detection with Variable Selection Methods,” developed new statistical tools—ELPASO, ShiVa, and ShiVa-ME—for identifying shifts in phenotypic evolution under Ornstein–Uhlenbeck models, including advances for variance-shift detection and measurement-error modeling. Her work integrates modern variable-selection techniques into phylogenetic comparative methods and has produced open-source R packages that improve the analysis of trait evolution. Wensha is currently a postdoctoral biostatistician fellow with the Canadian Cancer Trials Group at Queen’s University, where she develops statistical models for oncology clinical trials.