Sakshi Arya joined the department in August, 2021. Prior to joining Penn State, she worked as a postdoctoral scholar with Prof. Ansu Chatterjee at the School of Statistics, University of Minnesota. She is currently working with professor Bharath Sriperumbudur devising methodology for using kernel methods in sequential decision-making problems, more specifically multi-armed bandit problems and establishing theoretical guarantees for the proposed methodology. More broadly, Sakshi is interested in building the necessary statistical methodology for solving problems using nonparametric tools of estimation. She is also also working with professor Murali Haran on an interdisciplinary project studying the impact of behavioral interventions on spatio-temporal infectious diseases data. This project is in collaboration with the Bharti lab at the Hucks Institutes of the Life Sciences. Sakshi taught STAT 414 (Introduction to Probability theory) in Fall 2021 and I will also teach STAT 414 in Fall 2022. She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Minnesota in 2020, her M.S. in Mathematics from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 2014, and a BS in Mathematics from University of Delhi in 2012.
Jacopo d’lorio joined Statistics in September, 2021. He joins us from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa in Italy. Jacopo is working with professor Francesca Chiaromonte, with interest in lustering and biclustering especially for functional data. He is working with Chiaromonte and Prof. Cremona (Université Laval) on functional motif discovery but started collaborating with professor Nicole Lazar on fMRI data, and professors Dennis Pearl and Neil Hatfied on the creation of the BOAST book of shiny apps for statistics education. In fall 2021, Jacopo taught sections 001 and 002 of STAT 380. He plans to be with Penn State until 2024.
Jia Song is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Statistics at The Pennsylvania State University. Her postdoc mentor is Professor Qunhua Li. Song received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 2010 from Tsinghua University (China) and her PhD in 2015 from The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (China). Her thesis project focused on studies of Hamming constraint sets and equation systems over finite fields. Before joining Penn State Statistics, she did short-term postdoctoral work at MIT and academic adjunct instructor work at Penn State Physics. Her recent research interest is the development of statistical methods for extracting and discovering patterns in large datasets.
