Dr Lax Chan BSc MSc PhD

School of Mathematics
Assistant Professor in Statistics

Contact details

Address
School of Mathematics
Watson Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Lax Chan is a statistician working in the area of Functional data analysis, in particular he is interested in the theoretical as well as methodological development of this area. His recent interests are in small ball probability and complexity problems. He is interested in also developing software packages in R.

Qualifications

  • PhD, The Open University
  • MSc, University of Liverpool
  • BSc (Hons), University of Liverpool

Biography

After his PhD, Dr Lax became a research assistant at the Horizon Institute, University of Nottingham, working on clustering and machine learning algorithms. He then took a research fellowship under Sir Bernard Silverman at the rights lab, University of Nottingham on developing methodologies in multiple systems estimation.

This was followed by a research assistantship with the knowledge media institute at the Open University, to work on combinatorial optimisation and deep learning algorithms applied to energy disaggregation. Between 2020 and 2024, he worked as a postdoctoral research assistant and junior assistant professor at the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy working on Functional data analysis, especially on small ball probability and single functional index model.

He moved to Birmingham in 2024.

Teaching

Semester 2

LI/LH Statistics

LM Nonparametic Statistics

 

Postgraduate supervision

Dr Lax supervises students in functional data analysis, in particular small ball probability, theoretical properties and applications.

Research

Research themes

  • Functional data analysis
  • Small ball probability
  • Single functional index models
  • Limit theorems of U-statistics

Research activity

Dr Chan works on the general field of Functional data analysis. He is interested in both the theoretical properties as well as the methodological development in this general area. In the last few years, he has been working mainly on small ball probability and complexity problems.