Newsletter
Spring/Summer 2024

As always, this spring has been one for celebration—as you will see below, we have so many new graduates to celebrate—and our department has been more vibrant than ever thanks to the many accomplishments of our students, alumni, faculty, and staff. I would like to begin by recognizing and thanking three faculty members who are retiring this summer—Jogesh Babu, Bruce Lord, and Dennis Pearl—for the years they have given to our department (a combined seven decades) and for their contributions to our community through research, teaching, and administration. You will read a little more about them below. Second, I am thrilled to share the news that Nicole Lazar is taking over as department head this summer. In addition to being a highly regarded scholar and teacher, she is dedicated to service, both to the department and the profession, prioritizes community, and has a deep commitment to big-picture issues like open science and reproducibility. The department, college, and University will benefit greatly from her leadership.

This is my last newsletter as department head. It has been an honor to serve in this role; it’s been mostly fun, and I’ve learned a lot! I’m very grateful for all the support I have received over the past six years. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent tensions and complications of dealing with a new budget model and unprecedented issues with staff retention have posed more challenges than I (or anyone else) had bargained for, but the rewards of being head have still far outweighed the difficulties. This is in large part because of the highly supportive community in the department, our high standards for research, teaching, and service, and the backing of a well-run Eberly College of Science.

A note of thanks: I should really thank a long list of staff who have done an amazing job in running the department smoothly; but for brevity, I’ll limit myself to highlighting a few in particular. Mel McKinney has been our administrative coordinator since December 2021, helping the department navigate many difficult staff-related issues and the new budget model, among other things, always with a smile. She’s been an asset to the department and to me. I have been incredibly lucky that all three of my assistants over the years—Sakshi Kukreja, Alice Chersoni, and Terra Deyo—have been outstanding; they are all smart, dedicated, and very, very nice! I am so happy that Terra, who has been hyper-efficient and organized and made me better at my job these past two years, will help Nicole as she navigates the long list of deadlines and to-do lists. Amy Schmoeller deserves special mention: she is the only staff member who began before the pandemic and is still with us, and she has been a model of efficiency, initiative, and dedication these past several years. Our department simply would not function without her and our other dedicated staff and faculty.

Many thanks in particular to faculty who stepped up to carry out major year-round responsibilities, such as associate head (Runze Li and Le Bao), graduate program chair (Ephraim Hanks and Bing Li), undergraduate leadership (Matt Beckman and Priyangi Bulathsinhala), Statistics Consulting Center director (Maggie Niu), director of the master of applied statistics degree program (Mosuk Chow), and Penn State World Campus director (Prabhani Kuruppumullage Don). And no one understands the job better than former department heads: Jim Rosenberger and Dave Hunter have had valuable insights. The list of faculty, staff, students, and others who have been invaluable to the department is, of course, much longer, but in the interest of not taking up the entire newsletter, many thanks to all of you (you know who you are)!

Between the impacts of the pandemic and the social justice movements spurred by the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, it would not be hyperbole to say that the world is a lot different now from what it was when I started as department head in 2018. But I’m happy to share that even though many things about how we operate have changed, our department has continued to thrive in terms of research and education, and in fostering a sense of community. I’ve included, below, photos that captured a little bit of this unusual period—online Zoom conversations during the pandemic to keep us connected to each other (first photo, July 7, 2020) and our first in-person faculty meeting during the pandemic (second photo, August 24, 2021).

Since I think the newsletter also serves as an archive of departmental history, here are some summaries about changes to our department between 2018 and 2024: We added 16 new faculty members (Sam Baugh, Stephen Berg, Marjorie Bond, Helen Greatrex, Neil Hatfield, Jung In Kim, Nicole Lazar, Cory McCartan, Mauricio Nascimento, Michael Schweinberger, Matt Slifko, Hyebin Song, Hyungsuk Tak, Yogasudha Veturi, Yubai Yuan, and Xiang Zhu) while 13 faculty retired or left (Michael Akritas, Naomi Altman, Jogesh Babu, Kirsten Eilertson,  Ethan Fang, Dennis Lin, Lynn Lin, Bruce Lord, Kari L. Morgan, Dennis Pearl, Matt Reimherr, Don Richards, and Ben Shaby); our faculty today is clearly quite different from the faculty we had six years ago. The staff turnover—at least partially attributable to nationwide retention issues post pandemic—was noteworthy: with only about 10 staff positions total, we hired a total of 22 staff during this period. Prior to this, it was common for staff to spend most of their careers with us; but in the past six years, we rarely went a few months without having to replace a staff member. It is a testament to our staff and faculty that our department has functioned as smoothly as it has over the past six years.

Before I sign off, I’d like to remind you of the annual alumni reception at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Portland, Oregon; JSM alumni reunions are one of the highlights of the meetings every year. This year’s reception will be held on Sunday, August 4, from 5:30 p.m.–7:00 p.m. in the Multnomah Room at the Hyatt Regency Portland at the Oregon Convention Center. Preregistration by July 31 is required. I look forward to seeing you there! Here’s wishing you a lovely summer and fall.

With best wishes,
Murali Haran

Varun Patel, who graduated with a bachelor of science degree in 2023, is pursuing two master’s degrees: a master’s in data science and analytics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and a master’s in applied statistics as a World Campus student at Penn State. After some time working as a statistician at a biotech company in Philadelphia, Spark Therapeutics, Varun is now working part-time at Magoosh, Inc., in Washington, DC, as a business analyst/data scientist. Varun is very excited to go to Germany this fall as a visiting researcher. He will be working in Bremen, Germany, (a beautiful town in the north) in the field of explainable artificial intelligence, where he will be applying his skills to real-world data to help businesses. During his time there, he also plans to continue progressing through his Penn State master of applied statistics degree.

Likun Zhang, who graduated with a doctorate in 2020, was awarded Assistant Professor of the Year at the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri. Likun is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Missouri. 

Kiranmoy Das, who graduated with a doctorate in 2011, was awarded the International Indian Statistical Association 2023 Early Career Award in Statistics and Data Science in the Application track. He is a professor at Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications.

Nandini Kannan, who graduated with a doctorate in 1992, has joined Plaksha University in Punjab, India, as professor and director of the Data Science Institute. She most recently served as the executive director of the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, a binational organization established by the Indian and US governments to catalyze collaborations between the science and technology communities. At the organization, she helped to develop new initiatives to support research-and-development collaborations in critical areas such as COVID-19 and clean energy.

Annie Qu, who graduated with a doctorate in 1998 and is now Chancellor’s Professor of Statistics at the University of California-Irvine, will give one of the Medallion Lectures at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Portland this August. This honor is given to select faculty each year by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics’ Committee on Special Lectures. Her talk, titled “Data Integration for Heterogeneous Data,” will be given on Monday, August 5, 2024.

Statistics faculty participated in a retreat in October 2023 to discuss departmental priorities. The goal was to revisit the original strategic plan from October 2020 and distill our current priorities into single-page versions of strategic plans for our research, graduate program, undergraduate program, consulting center, and visibility/alumni relations/fundraising. The thought was that shorter strategic plans were more likely to be of value to our department. It was a lively and enjoyable discussion; the resulting documents will hopefully provide ideas for how to think about the future of our department. While looking for strategic plans, we unearthed photos from a May 2014 faculty retreat to discuss our graduate program (two on the left, below); that meeting led to major changes in our graduate curriculum. A couple of photos from the more recent fall 2023 retreat (two on the right, below), held in the business school, are also included.

Nicole Lazar will be the next head of the Department of Statistics, beginning July 1, 2024. Nicole was previously on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Georgia; she was acting chair of her department at the latter institution. She has worked on the foundations of statistical inference and has been a leader in the statistical analysis of cognitive neuroscience data and functional magnetic resonance imaging, and she is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Since joining Penn State in 2020, she has been part of the leadership program at the Huck Institute of the Life Sciences, where she is a cohire, and has led efforts on campus on issues relating to open science and transparency and reproducibility in research. Nicole is the ninth person to serve as the head of the Department of Statistics. The previous heads were James B. Bartoo (1968–1969), Bill Harkness and R.A. Hultquist (joint heads, 1969–1970), Bill Harkness (1970–1987), Thomas Hettmansperger (1988–1990 and 2002–2003), James Rosenberger (1990–2002 and 2003–2006), Bruce Lindsay (2006–2012), David Hunter (2012–2018), and Murali Haran (2018–2024).

Aleksandra “Seša” Slavković, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Data Privacy and Confidentiality and professor of statistics and of public health sciences, has been named the associate dean for research in the college.

John Haubrick, assistant teaching professor of statistics, is among the Penn State faculty chosen by Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology to serve on its inaugural Teaching and Learning Technologies Faculty Advisory Committee for the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 academic years.

Matthew Beckman has been appointed to a three-year term as director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, beginning on July 1, 2024. He will be playing a prominent leadership role in what is one of the leading statistics education organizations in the world. He has been active in the consortium’s activities for many years, including serving as associate codirector for research, along with Laura Le. Matt will succeed Dennis Pearl as the consortium’s director, as Dennis will be retiring from Penn State and from the consortium on June 30, 2024.

Lingzhou Xue has been awarded the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Fellowship, which “honors its members’ outstanding research and professional contributions, which help keep IMS in a leading role in the fields of statistics and probability.”

In addition, he was selected as a 2024–2025 Huck Leadership Fellow. The Huck Leadership Fellows program, launched in 2022, is a yearlong professional development opportunity for faculty members to experience and contribute to senior institutional leadership. Lingzhou plans to focus on catalyzing the use of artificial intelligence methods and tools to tackle complex challenges in the life sciences. He is the second statistics faculty member to become a Huck Leadership Fellow, after Nicole Lazar (2022–2023).

Runze Li has received the Harry Carver Medal from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The citation reads: “The award is made in recognition of his exceptional contributions to IMS, especially through his steady service and guidance of the Annals of Statistics editorial board as coeditor and then as editor during a long period of difficult times due to unexpected circumstances. Professor Li has also made excellent contributions as program chair of joint meetings of the IMS and several different Pacific Rim statistical associations.”

He is the third person with strong statistics department ties to receive this award; the previous two are alumna Jessica Utts and former department head Bill Harkness.

Ephraim Hanks has been chosen to receive the prestigious International Environmetrics Society’s 2024 Abdel El-Shaarawi Early Investigator’s Award. The award was established by the society’s board in order to recognize and honor early investigators who have made outstanding contributions to the development of statistical and/or quantitative approaches for research in the environmental sciences. The citation for the award reads: “For outstanding contributions to environmental statistics, especially in the field of ecology; for key methodological developments in spatial and spatiotemporal statistics; for strong interdisciplinary work, especially in modeling animal movement; for extensive and continued support to the field of environmental statistics.’’ He is the second statistics faculty member to win this, the previous being Murali Haran in 2015.

Dave Hunter has been selected as a recipient of the 2024 Eberly College of Science Distinguished Service Award. This award recognizes his outstanding leadership and service to the college and its positive impact.

Faculty Promotions

Bharath Sriperumbudur has been promoted to professor, effective July 2024.

Bharath received his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California San Diego in 2010. Prior to joining Penn State in 2014, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College, London, and a research fellow in statistics at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Among his research interests are nonparametric statistics, machine learning, statistical learning theory, optimal transport and gradient flows, reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, and functional and topological data analysis.

Qunhua Li has been promoted to professor, effective July 2024.

Qunhua received her doctorate in statistics from the University of Washington in 2008. Prior to joining Penn State in 2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on statistical methods for addressing questions in biology and health, specifically developing statistical and computational methods for analyzing complex omics data and improving quality and reproducibility of high-throughput data.

Michael Schweinberger has been promoted to professor, effective July 2024.

Michael received his doctorate from the University of Groningen, Netherlands, in 2007, has had postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Washington and at Penn State, and was on the faculty at Rice University and the University of Missouri before joining Penn State in 2022. His research focuses on the mathematical foundations of learning from discrete and dependent data, scalable computational and statistical methods, and probability models for social sciences.

John Haubrick has been promoted to associate teaching professor, effective July 2024.

John received his master of education degree in educational leadership from Penn State in 2007. Prior to joining the statistics department in 2018, John worked in instructional design for Penn State’s World Campus programs, was an adjunct professor for Continuing Education at Penn State, and was mathematics curriculum coordinator for the Mifflin County School District. Since 2018, he has led instructional design for World Campus programs in statistics, plays a very important role in supporting online teaching and learning in our department—this was particularly valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic—and has made many contributions to teaching and learning at Penn State beyond our department, notably through his leadership in the Evidence-Based Teaching Academy. He is active in research in pedagogy, which has had an impact on our peer review process for online teaching. He has also regularly taught and implemented new pedagogical ideas for the 700-student section of STAT 200.

Faculty Retirements

Jogesh Babu is retiring after four decades at Penn State. He was named Distinguished Professor of Statistics in January 2018, a recognition of his pioneering work in establishing the new cross-disciplinary field of astrostatistics with Eric Feigelson in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He has received international recognition for his work, for instance receiving the prestigious Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research in 2018. Thanks to the Babu-Feigelson team, Penn State has been a leader in the field of astrostatistics which has grown in prominence in recent years as an increasing number of major questions in astronomy require statistical expertise. He has been influential in the field in more ways than just through research. For instance, his leadership since 2005 of the annual summer schools in astrostatistics has introduced the next generation of astronomers to modern statistics through tutorials, many run by our own faculty. Prior to his work in astrostatistics, he was internationally recognized for his research on the theoretical underpinnings of the bootstrap as well as his contributions to research at the intersection of probability and number theory; he even has three papers with the legendary Paul Erdös, giving him an impressive Erdos number of one! He has also played a central role in teaching important theory courses such as probability and measure theory and has contributed to the department through diligent service. Finally, as the seniormost faculty member of our department for the past few years, he has had many stories to share of days gone by in our department. Fortunately for us, he plans to continue to be engaged with the Center for Astrostatistics, a center he cofounded, for a little longer. We wish him the best with this next chapter.

Bruce Lord received his doctorate in forest resources from Penn State in 2001, after a master of science degree in forest resources and operations research from Penn State in 1987 and a bachelor of arts degree in forest science in 1978. Having worked on research centering around the economic impact of public lands on rural economies, he brought practical thinking to his teaching of courses in our department, where he has taught numerous undergraduate and graduate service courses since 2010. 

Bruce has always cared deeply about teaching, investing a lot of time and energy into his students, with a steady stream of them showing up to his office hours each week. He has also always been ready to step in to teach any course that would be helpful to the department. In addition to serving on our faculty, Bruce has also played an important role in local politics, serving as a supervisor for Harris Township since 2015.  Fortunately, Bruce plans to live in town and still teach for us, even if in a reduced capacity, so we will continue to see him regularly. Congratulations, Bruce, and we’re glad we’ll still see you!

Dennis Pearl joined Penn State nearly 10 years ago after a distinguished career at Ohio State, where he made major contributions to phylogenetics, biostatistics, methods for cancer biomarkers, and statistics education, among other topics. At Penn State, he has focused on statistics education research, serving as the director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, a leading organization supporting the advancement of undergraduate statistics education. In addition to his research and leadership, he has also mentored a large number of undergraduate researchers, particularly in the summer ShinyApps program, developing tools for teaching statistics. He has mentored the next generation of statistics education researchers. We are very grateful to have had Dennis at Penn State all these years and wish him the best post-retirement.

Jessica Bickle, Graduate Program Coordinator

Jessica joined the statistics department in March 2024, from the human resources department at Hort Woods, where she worked as an early childhood education teacher. As the graduate program coordinator, Jessica is the contact for graduate programs, graduate course scheduling, final exam requests, student enrollments, processing of graduate forms, and maintenance of graduate records. Most recently, she graduated from Penn State with her master’s degree in curriculum and instruction in fall 2022. She is originally from Coburn, Pennsylvania.

Al Woods, Instructional Production Specialist

Al joined the statistics department in April 2024 as the new instructional production specialist on the statistics online team. Al graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English in 2019. He has a background in technical writing, content editing, and accessibility standards for the web. In his free time, he writes sci-fi/fantasy, detective, and romance fiction, and he takes care of his parakeet, Angie, who appreciates him the most for his ability to provide her with an apparently infinite supply of lettuce. Al will handle many of the technical aspects of our online courses in both Canvas and the online notes.

Kimberly Cameron, Financial Associate

Kim joined the statistics department in April 2024, following a long career in the banking industry and some time as a financial assistant for University Health Services at Penn State. She joined the team as a financial associate, where she will be working with budget management, gifts and endowments oversight, financial processing, payroll and effort management, policy guidance and compliance, and procedure documentation and compliance. She resides in Bellefonte with her husband, Dale.

Aaron Garcia, Graphic Design Specialist

Aaron joined the statistics department in July 2024 as the new graphic design specialist. He graduated from Penn State with a bachelor of arts degree in digital arts and media design, with extensive knowledge in animation and motion graphics. In his free time, he loves to play video games, eat at new restaurants, and travel. Aaron will focus on developing graphics/designs and videos for the department, as well as video editing and the departmental newsletter.

Melanie McKinney was recognized recently for her 25 years of service with Penn State. Mel has been a member of our department twice: first as graduate program coordinator some years ago and then, since December 2021, as our administrative support manager. We have been very lucky to have her both times, but especially in recent years during this phase of unprecedented challenges of staff turnover. She not only works hard to maintain staff morale and to support staff by working closely with them, she is unerringly polite and helpful to all staff, faculty, and students and does her best to keep things running smoothly. At various times she has played—often for months together—the role of graduate program coordinator, events manager, and financial administrator, while still maintaining all of her other responsibilities. She’s an asset to our department, and we are so glad she is with us as she celebrates 25 years at Penn State. 

Statistics Faculty Involved in New National Science Foundation Center to Study How Complex Biological Processes Arise

Two of our faculty, Nicole Lazar and Hyebin Song, are part of a $20 million National Science Foundation grant to support a new Penn State center, the National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences. This center aims to promote synthesis research, which aims to integrate various publicly available data to promote new scientific discoveries. A major aim of this project is to enhance data-driven collaborative research and accelerate discoveries through new statistical and artificial-intelligence methods.

This spring semester, the Statistics Graduate Student Association was busy hosting new workshops for graduate students and helping coordinate multiple department events. The Research Lightning Talks event was a strong start to the semester in early February. This event is geared toward first- and second-year doctoral students who are still exploring potential research topics and finding an adviser they are interested in working with, but it is also an opportunity for the department to hear about the exciting work that is being done by other faculty and more senior graduate students.

In addition, the graduate student association hosted regular workshops for students that covered a variety of topics, including a panel about qualifying exams, accessible teaching and teaching assistantships (with the help of the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence), and more-technical topics like an introduction to LaTeX and ggplot. As the spring semester was coming to a close, the graduate student town hall with department head Murali Haran, graduate program chair Bing Li, and incoming department head Nicole Lazar took place on April 17, 2024, and shortly after that the nominations and subsequent elections for new officers began. To the 2023–2024 officers—Abby Sine, Kaitlyn Fales, Wenlong Yang, and Won Gu—thank you all for a wonderful academic year! Please join us in welcoming the 2024–2025 officers: Won Gu, president; Noah Feldman, vice president; Ryan Halstater, treasurer; and Mike Callahan, event coordinator.

Chaegeun Song, also advised by Bing Li, was the runner-up for the Harkness Award, and the honorable mention went to Susan Lloyd, advised by Matthew Beckman and Nicole Lazar.

Samantha Roth received the Student Travel Award for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Uncertainty Quantification in Italy, where she presented her research on statistically approximating a high-resolution flood model.  

Michael Callahan is the recipient of the 2024–2025 Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute Translational Research Training Award. Michael is a second-year doctoral student working with Xiang Zhu on his dissertation. He is the first in our department to receive this highly selective National Institutes of Health–funded award.

Three of our graduate students were recognized for their research at the New England Statistical Symposium. Omar Hagrass and Kyle Stanley were 2 of only 10 students honored by the symposium’s Student Research Awards committee for the overall quality of their research. The paper Omar submitted, titled “Minimax Optimal Goodness-of-Fit Tests with Kernel Stein Discrepancy,” is a joint work with Bharath Sriperumbudur and Krishnakumar Balasubramanian at the University of California, Davis. Kyle’s paper, titled “Functional Factor Modelling of Brain Connectivity,” is a joint work with Nicole Lazar and Matthew Reimherr. And Olivia Beck received a Student Poster Award for the overall quality of her research, under the supervision of Nicole Lazar. Congratulations, all!

Mu Sigma Rho Graduate Student Inductees

Jessica Hamblin
Shuhang Lou
Sanam Sanei
Abby Sine
Yin Tang
Wenlong Yang 

Spring 2024 Student Marshals

Anqi Wang was the student marshal for the Eberly College of Science during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 5, 2024. As a member of the Penn State Schreyer Honors College, Anqi graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0 grade-point average and bachelor’s degrees in statistics and biochemistry and molecular biology with a minor in mathematics. She had ​​two summers of biostatistical research experience through the Harvard Systems Biology Undergraduate Internship, and she served as the director of communication last year and the treasurer this year at Nittany Data Labs at Penn State. Anqi received the Penn State Evan Pugh Scholar Senior Award, which recognized the top 0.5 percent of students in her class. She plans to start her doctorate in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, this fall.

Ryan Dang was the student marshal in statistics, representing the statistics department during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 5, 2024. Ryan graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics. He served as an information technology support specialist intern and a teaching assistant, and he won an award for his excellence as an undergraduate teaching assistant last fall.

Jingxuan Wang was the student marshal in data sciences, representing the statistics department during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 5, 2024. Jingxuan graduated with bachelor’s degrees in data sciences and mathematics. He is a member of the Mu Sigma Rho and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies. Under the guidance of Professor Fenglong Ma, Jingxuan is developing a multimodal dataset tailored for federated learning to address real-world healthcare challenges.  

Mu Sigma Rho Undergraduate Student Inductees

Jeffrey Carswell
Annalise Chang
Katie Clayton
Dean Conroy
Rui Du
Luqi Jiao Emanuele
Yiwen Huang
Emre Keskin
Jun Sung Kim
Brian MacCurtin
Robert McGill
John Miller
Jessica Payne
Roshan Shah
Qiuyi Zhu

Awards for Excellence as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

Ryan Dang
Kelly Wolfe

Starting in August 2024, Satarupa Bhattacharjee will be an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida. She joined Penn State as a postdoctoral fellow in 2022 and was mentored by Bing Li and Lingzhou Xue.

Cornelius Fritz has accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin and will start his position in August 2024. He joined Penn State as a postdoctoral fellow in 2023 and was mentored by Dave Hunter and Michael Schweinberger.

Jacopo Di Iorio has accepted an assistant teaching position in the quantitative theory and methods department at Emory University, which he will start at the end of August. He joined Penn State as a postdoctoral fellow in 2021 and was mentored by Francesca Chiaromonte.

Winter Party and Awards Ceremony

Lightning Talks

DataFest

The American Statistical Association DataFest is a celebration of data in which student teams work around the clock to find and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex dataset. Our department hosted the Penn State edition of DataFest 2024. From March 15 to 17, 2024, undergraduate students from across the University competed to find the most meaningful insights and build the most revealing visualizations of this year’s data, which consisted of online notes data from CourseKata. A total of 19 teams submitted presentations for the final ceremony.

Congratulations to our Best in Show–winning teams (a tie!): the Data Divas (Alyssa Sheffy, Danni Healey, Elizabeth Marchini, and Kelly Wolfe) and Team BDA (Chanho Shin, Evelyn Park, Hoin Lee, Seungjae Lee, and Sungheon Lee).

This event was organized and supported by Mauricio Nascimento, Matt Slifko, Andrew Ferguson, Amy Schmoeller, and Kati Taylor.

Science Achievement Graduate Fellowship Lecture

Elizabeth Stuart, Professor and Chair of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, was selected by the Science Achievement Graduate Fellows to deliver the 2024 Science Achievement Graduate Fellowship Lecture on March 26, 2024. The title of her talk was “Learning What Works in Populations for Public Health and Public Policy: The Role of Careful Study Design, Statistics, and Statisticians.”

Undergraduate Awards Ceremony and Party

On April 16, 2024, the statistics department’s faculty, staff, and undergraduate students gathered to recognize our student marshals, academic honors students, and Mu Sigma Rho inductees, and to celebrate all those graduating with their bachelor’s degrees in statistics and data sciences. In what has become an annual tradition over the past few years, this was an opportunity for our undergraduates to interact with each other as well as faculty and staff.

End-of-Year Party

At the conclusion of the spring semester, faculty, staff, and graduate students of the statistics department gathered at the Verne M. Willaman Gateway to the Sciences to enjoy one another’s company and food and recognize our outstanding faculty and graduate students at our end-of-year party. 

Bharath Sriperumbudur was honored with the Rosenberger Outstanding Teaching Award “for his outstanding lectures, passion for education, and commitment to student success, which have led to innovative and stimulating courses and furthered the intellectual growth of students and mentees in our graduate program.”

Priyangi Bulathsinhala was honored with the Rosenberger Outstanding Service Award “for her invaluable leadership and steadfast support of students and colleagues as chair of undergraduate advising and for her dedication and rigor in revising, expanding course content, and coordinating the delivery of STAT 500 for the World Campus program.”

Graduating Students

The following graduates were awarded degrees in fall 2023 and spring 2024. On behalf of everyone in the Department of Statistics and the Eberly College of Science, congratulations to all of our graduating students!

Graduate Degrees Awarded

Doctorate in Statistics, Fall 2023, University Park Campus

Huy Dang
Thesis: “Modeling Data in Time and Space—Studies of Irregularities, Dependence Structure, and Applications” 
Adviser: Francesca Chiaromonte

Doctorate in Statistics, Spring 2024, University Park Campus

Sanam Sanei
Thesis: “Essays in HIV: Mapping the Distribution of Marginalized Groups and Analysis of ART Treatment Effectiveness across Patient Groups”
Adviser: Le Bao

Manuel Hernandez Bejarano
Thesis: “Density Estimation for Some Semiparametric Models”
Adviser: Zhibiao Zhao

Master of Science in Statistics, Fall 2023, University Park Campus
Francesca Yaukey

Master of Applied Statistics in Statistics, Fall 2023, University Park Campus
Hsinling Hsieh
Rachel McLeod

Master of Applied Statistics in Statistics, Fall 2023, World Campus
Khalid Althubiti
Mohammad Amiri
Valerie Burger
Miriam Chappelka
Charles Cratty
Kelly Holt
Jeremy Johnson
Sharon Kent
Jaesung Lee
Keith Maupin
John McKay
Zachary Oberholtzer
Brian Sloan
Matthew Tartt
Arielle Thibeault
Vladislav Torlov

Master of Applied Statistics in Statistics, Spring 2024, University Park Campus
Leo Bell
Tzuen Chen
Luqi Jiaoemanuele
Shuhang Lou
Amy Scholl
Jiujiu Wang
Bing Zhang
Yingying Zhu
Yuxiao Zhu

Master of Applied Statistics in Statistics, Spring 2024, World Campus
Rose Azalde
Shenita Basdeo
Heather Foes
Lisa Gerken
Bridget Hentz
Mary Herndon
Zixuan Herting
Alison Julson
Croix Keener
Chinglaam Luk
Arati Nair
Noah Robertson
Smrithi Srinivasan
Katherine Stanford
Ziqi Yan
Daisy Young

Undergraduate Degrees Awarded

Bachelor of Science in Statistics, Fall 2023, University Park Campus
Maria Anglero Mendez
Casey DiCampli
Vineeth Gabbireddy
Eric Geesaman
Claire Kessel
Erik Ketterer
Seung Jun Kim
Riley Kresge
Jong Hee Lee
Connor McCormick
Allison Rachor
Jordan Skinner
Sejun Song
Chenyu Wang
Michael Ward
Jingcheng Xiao
Ian Zhi
Wenbo Zhong
Dengchen Zhu

Bachelor of Science in Data Sciences, Fall 2023, University Park Campus
Hengshan Hao
Eunice Hong
Erik Loro
Adithya Sadagopan

Bachelor of Science in Statistics, Spring 2024, University Park Campus
Edward Alco II
William Bevidas Jr.
Xinyu Chen
Ryan Dang
Rui Du
Luke Geier
Yining Guan
Maxwell Hahn
Luqi Jiao Emanuele
Sagan Kakkar
Deohyung Kim
Jun Sung Kim
Wonbin Kim
Alexandra Kowalsky
Daniel Lee
Gabriella Leonardis
Henry Lex
Chutian Li
Xiangting Li
Olivia Lindberg
Daniel Mikita
Kevin Mouck
Jessica Payne
Tingyu Qian
Tigran Saakyan
Amy Scholl
Roshan Shah
Minghao Song
Pengyu Tao
Finnian Thompson
James Tondt
Anqi Wang
Yikun Wei
Yayuan Wen
Guoheng Wu
Huanzhang Xia
Yue Yang
I Geon Ye
Yamin Zhang
Shuyin Zheng
Qiuyi Zhu

Bachelor of Science in Data Sciences, Spring 2024, University Park Campus
Devansh Agarwal
Mohammed AlRasebi
Mingrui Chen
Aoran Cui
Daniel Dawson
Alexander Grimm
Young Hoon Kim
Kofwana Lawson
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