Department of Statistics
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Newsletter | Fall 2023
From the Department Head
I write this letter a day after “falling back,” our annual ritual of setting our clock back by an hour that ushers in longer nights and chillier days. As academics, this is also when we reach an intense portion of the semester close to Thanksgiving break, the semicalm before the end-of-semester storm. Summer seems like a long time ago! As always, the Penn State alumni reception was a summer highlight at the Joint Statistical Meetings held in Toronto in early August this year. It was great to see everyone. In the department, we held the third edition of the Department of Statistics Public Lecture Series, where each semester one of our faculty presents statistical ideas at a level that is appealing and understandable to a broad audience. This fall’s public talk, on functional data, was given by Francesca Chiaromonte. Soon after, we hosted the first ever Keystone State Statistics Symposium, co-organized by Penn State, Temple, and the University of Pittsburgh, where we brought together academic statisticians from across the state of Pennsylvania. We hope this opportunity for statisticians from across the state to mingle will become an annual tradition. Yanyuan Ma, from our department, gave the keynote talk on connections between missing data and causal inference. As always, our faculty, students, and staff have received many accolades this summer and fall from the profession and the University; you can read about some of them below.
This fall also marked the end of an era. Professor C.R. Rao passed away in August at the age of 102. One of the great minds of twentieth century statistics and science, he was a presence in our department from when he joined our faculty in 1988 until around 2010 when he moved to Buffalo to live with his daughter, Tejaswini Rao. We were privileged to have a luminary like him around the department for close to two decades. It was remarkable to have a colleague who not only had a front row seat to the emergence of modern statistics—Professor Rao was a student of R.A. Fisher, arguably the founder of modern statistics—but also actively contributed to the foundations of our discipline himself. His mere presence in the department attracted distinguished visitors and greatly contributed to our visibility in the field. He was also sociable, and I remember, as a new assistant professor, attending parties that he and his wife, Bhargavi, would host at their home. He had a very long and impactful life and leaves behind an extraordinary legacy of scholarship.
Before signing off, I’d like to share with you a short video that an alumnus, Wei Zhong (Ph.D. 2012), kindly shared with us. Wei is currently chair of the Department of Statistics at Xiamen University, China, and is visiting Penn State this semester with his wife, alumna Jingyuan Liu (Ph.D. 2013). The video was taken on September 24, 2008. Wei says he was in a course called Communications in Statistics for which, as part of an assignment to learn about a famous statistician, he chose to interview Professor Rao. In this short video, he asks Professor Rao to share his thoughts with future generations of statisticians. The formality of his carefully prepared speech as well as his trademark shrug-and-smile immediately brought back memories of this legendary figure who once inhabited Thomas Building with the rest of us. Watch the video on YouTube.
With best wishes to you and yours for the holiday season and beyond,
—Murali
Remembering C. R. Rao (1920–2023)
Feature Story
Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) 2023 in Toronto, Canada
This year’s JSM in Toronto was another opportunity for members of our broader community to get together, to rekindle old relationships, and to form new connections. A few highlights from this year’s conference:
Professor Runze Li presented his Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Medallion Lecture, “Feature Screening for Ultra-High Dimensional Data: Methods and Applications.” Each year, eight Medallion Lecturers are chosen across all areas of statistics and probability by the IMS Committee on Special Lectures. The Medallion nomination is an honor and acknowledgment of a significant research contribution to one or more areas of research.
At the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) reception at JSM, Lingzhou Xue received the NISS Distinguished Service Award and Murali Haran received the NISS Distinguished Alumni Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research.
Alumni Updates
Faculty News
Faculty Awards
Staff News
Staff Excellence Award Ceremony
Murali Haran said, “We are very lucky to have Mel McKinney as our admin support coordinator. It was a stroke of good fortune for us to recruit her back to the department two years ago from the dean’s office; prior to her stint at the dean’s office she had served for many years as our grad program staff administrator. Mel has been an enormously positive influence on the efficiency and professionalism of our staff, and hence our department as a whole. I have heard multiple staff tell me just how supportive she is, and how she lends a sympathetic ear when they have challenges, and goes the extra mile in providing them with assistance with their duties. Our department has had some challenges in recent years, particularly with retaining staff, and Mel’s presence here has been really valuable to ensure continuity and competence, and to maintain an excellent climate. On a personal note, my job as department head has been infinitely easier thanks to Mel. Her staff excellence award is very well deserved. Congratulations to Mel!”
We are grateful to Amy Schmoeller for serving on the Staff Advisory Committee, which helped plan this event.
Dennis Pearl,and Larry Lesser from the University of Texas at El Paso have collaborated for nearly two decades on the use of songs, videos, cartoons, poems, quotes, puzzles, and other fun materials in teaching statistics. They recently completed a set of a dozen papers—between fall 2019 and summer 2023—on using edutainment in the teaching of introductory statistics topics like polling, experimentation, the census, descriptive statistics, confounding, correlation, regression, probability, estimation, and hypothesis testing. The set of papers covered more than a hundred learning objectives and were published in Teaching Statistics: An International Journal for Statistics and Data Science Teaching. The last of these papers, dealing with data visualization, was chosen to be the first discussion paper in the journal’s 45-year history. The papers provide lesson plan guidance including how to pair items with other active learning materials and, because the journal is international in scope, they go beyond U.S.-centric items to use examples intended for a global audience of statistics teachers.
Graduate News
University Graduate Fellowships
Undergraduate News
Statistics Club
The Statistics Club held a résumé workshop in preparation for Penn State’s annual career fair. Club member Abeer Mathur (B.S. 2024) gave a short presentation and tips on constructing a résumé. The Statistics Club also had speakers from Fast Enterprises, a leading government software consultant, present job and internship opportunities with their company. The National Security Agency (NSA) brought a real enigma machine and demonstrated its use and presented opportunities to members of the club. The Statistics Club also participated in the Eberly College of Science involvement fair and held a study night for students as they prepared for upcoming exams.
Club Officers
Jordan Skinner, vice president
Abeer Mathur, vice president shadow
Rahil Radia, secretary
Erik Ketterer, corporate outreach
Zeynep Demir, webmaster
Jessica Payne, social chair
Postdoctoral News
New Postdocs
Emrah Altun joined the statistics department as a postdoctoral fellow in September 2023. He received his Ph.D. in statistics at Hacettepe University, in Turkey, where he worked on heavy-tailed and skewed distributions under the supervision of Professor Huseyin Tatlidil. As a postdoc, Emrah is working with Professor Qunhua Li on differential networks for gene expression data.
Department Events
Public Lecture Series
Fall Picnic
Thanks to Kati Taylor and all of the other staff for organizing the picnic, and thanks to everyone who attended!
Keystone State Statistics Symposium
Tussey Mountainback
Another year and another group of runners from the Department of Statistics teamed up to conquer the Tussey Mountainback Relay, a 50-mile relay race traversing the fire roads throughout Rothrock State Forest. The course winds through Whipple Dam State Park, Alan Seeger Natural Area, Penn Roosevelt State Park, Colyer Lake, and Bear Meadows Natural Area. The team, named Ridge Regression, completed 12 legs of varying length and elevation in 7:51:23 and consisted of (left to right) Omar Hagrass, Stephen Berg, Cornelius Fritz, John Haubrick, Sam Baugh, Alyssa Hu, and Samantha Roth. David Hunter successfully ran the 50k individual race.
Graduating Students
Doctorate in Statistics, Summer 2023
Shuo Shuo Liu
Samidha Sudhakar Shetty
Siddharth Vishwanath
Zhe Zhang
Rebekah Bright
Robert Crossgrove
Tina Dhekial-Phukan
Melissa Gosse
Maren Jensen
Raphael Kinney
Craig Sinkler
Michael Swarlis
Michael Tran
William Walters
Kristin Whitmeyer
Le Yang
Bachelor of Science in Statistics, Summer 2023
Xuanying Zhao
Stuart Vas
Divyesh Johri
Newsletter Credits
If you have any corrections or additions for this issue, or items for the next issue, please email Terra Deyo at terra.deyo@psu.edu.