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The Newsletter of the Department of Statistics

2021-22 Postdocs

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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.

2021-22 Graduate Honors and Awards

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Elizabeth Eisenhauer

Elizabeth Eisenhauer (PhD advisers: Ephraim Hanks and Matthew Beckman) was awarded the 2021 Harkness Award for outstanding efforts in teaching and scholarly approaches to teaching and learning, especially at the 300 level.

Alyssa Hu

Alyssa Hu (PhD adviser: Dave Hunter) was recognized as the 2021 Runner up for the Harkness Award for her excellence in classroom teaching in lower division courses.

Tobia Boschi

Tobia Boschi (PhD adviser: Francesca Chiaromonte) was awarded the 2021 Award for Support of Undergraduate Instruction for excellence in on-line instruction and service to UP instruction as a teaching assistant.

Bokgyeong Kang

Bokgyeong Kang (PhD advisers: Murali Haran and John Hughes) was awarded the 2021 Award for Support of Graduate Instruction for excellence in support of teaching stochastic processes at the Master’s level.

Claire Kelling

Claire Kelling (PhD adviser: Murali Haran) received the received the 2022 Alumni Association Graduation Dissertation Award. The award provides funding and recognition to outstanding full-time doctor of philosophy students who have passed their comprehensive exams, have received approval of the dissertation topic and are within their final year of enrollment. This award is considered to be among the most prestigious available to Penn State graduate students and recognizes outstanding achievement in scholarship and professional accomplishment.

Roopali Singh

Roopali Singh (PhD adviser: Qunhua Li) received The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) New Researchers Travel Award. The purpose of the ISBA New Researchers Travel Award is to support participation in ISBA Meetings by junior researchers, and is open to any junior researcher.

Roopali presented the work titled “Reference-free deconvolution of cell mixtures in spatial transcriptomics” in Montreal, Canada, in June 2022. This work is jointly supervised by Xiang Zhu and Qunhua Li.

2021 Honorable Mentions

For terrific work in supporting the teaching mission of the Department:
Lower division: Huy Dang
Upper Division: Arun Srinivasan
Graduate: Siddharth Vishwanath

Outstanding Teaching Assistant

Online MAS student Li Zhang is being recognized for her contributions as an outstanding teaching assistant!

Zhang is advised by Mosuk Chow, and in Spring 2021, Zhang graded STAT484 and STAT 485 for online MAS instructor, Tracy Hammel.

About Zhang’s contributions as a TA, Hammel said, “From the beginning of the semester, Li has been responsive and eager to help. She grades promptly and consistently, and she provides thorough feedback for the students. All communications are professional and respectful. She seems to take being a TA seriously and she does her job well.”

Congratulations, Li, and job well done!

Sports Analytics Club places two students in the pros

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A good number of our students indicate an interest in sports statistics. These jobs are extremely difficult to come by for various reasons — few professional teams exist, not all employ a data science team, and those that do, often have fairly small teams. The result is a highly competitive market.

Despite these challenges our Sports Analytics Club (formed in the fall of 2019) has recently placed two of its members in this field. Mallet James (2021) was recently hired as a Data Scientist for the Detroit Pistons and Sameer Sapre (2020) was hired as an Assistant, Baseball Projects, with the Seattle Mariners.

Both graduated with degrees in Data Science. Having one graduate in such a position is nice and having two graduates get such positions is exciting; two in different major sports is truly outstanding. We are thrilled for Mallet and Sameer. These outcomes also provide a pathway for future students who aspire to work in this arena.
Advised by Associate Teaching Professor of Statistics, Andy Wiesner, The Penn State Sports Analytics Club is a student generated organization started in Fall 2019. Students across various academic disciplines contribute to the club success. Two members have successfully gained employment with a major professional sports team in data analytics, while several others have developed informative analytical websites. These sites plus more information such as how to join can be found here on the club’s website.

Shiny Apps Team Successful at Poster Competition

Shiny Apps Team Successful at Poster Competition

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The Department of Statistics’ Shiny App team was successful in the 2021 Undergraduate Research Poster Exhibition hosted this fall by the Eberly College of Science.

Under the guidance of Dennis Pearl and Neil Hatfield in the BOAST program, undergraduate students Shravani Samala, Lydia Bednarczyk, Tina Tu, Jiayue He, Yudan Zhang, and Adam Poleski — were awarded second place in the mathematical sciences category.

Known at the competition as the R Shiny Research Group, the students presented their winning work from the summer, including apps exploring counting techniques, maximum likelihood estimation, probability applications, and chi-square goodness-of-fit testing.

Read the full story here.

2022 Undergraduate Honors and Awards

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Deric Liang (senior, Statistics) was recognized at commencement as Student Marshal among Statistics Majors in the class of 2021.  In addition to Deric’s demonstrated excellence in coursework, he has also been engaged in several research projects, completed an internship, and a number of extracurricular interests.  In 2019, Deric was one of nine students selected for the National Science Foundation Ukraine REU studying the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health survey modeling risk factors for mental health diagnoses.  Deric also worked with Professor Qi Li (Economics) to build a data set of single-family loans from mortgage databases and investigated the extent to which face-to-face lenders may or may not discriminate against minorities compared to algorithmic lenders.  Additionally, Deric completed an internship with Bates White Economic Consulting, worked closely with Professors Francis Wham and Matthew Beckman as an Undergraduate TA in STAT 380, was actively engaged in THON, and has been President of the Penn State Glee Club.  Deric selected Professor Matthew Beckman as Faculty Marshal to escort him at Commencement.

Shunqi Zhang (senior, Data Science) was recognized at commencement as Student Marshal for the Statistical Modeling Data Sciences Major in the class of 2021.  In addition to Shunqi’s demonstrated excellence in coursework, he has also completed an internship, and participated in several research projects.  During Shunqi’s internship with Qingbo Big Data Technology Company he implemented a text mining algorithm to categorize different types of popular events, visualize the public attitude of and trend, and draft a synopsis—an experience that sparked an interest in more advanced study of networks and machine learning.  In 2019, Shunqi joined a team of undergraduate researchers supervised by Professor Dennis Pearl who developed educational web applets using R Shiny for use in statistics education research.  Shunqi then extended this work with a second research project implementing Bayesian Networks to evaluate learning outcomes using log file data from such interactive web applets.  Shunqi selected Professor Dennis Pearl as Faculty Marshal to escort him at Commencement.

Spring 2022 Student Marshals

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Owen Chase
Owen Chase was the student marshal for the Eberly College of Science during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 8, 2022. Chase graduates summa cum laude with a 4.0 grade-point average and a bachelor’s degrees in astronomy and astrophysics as well as statistics. He has received numerous awards including the 2021 Astronaut Scholarship, the Homer F. Braddock College of Science Memorial Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the Academic Excellence Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the 2021 Evan Pugh Scholar Award, and the 2020 President Sparks Award. Chase was also a Schreyer Scholar from 2018 to 2022 and was honored with the President’s Freshman Award in 2019. Read more >>
Grant Hopkins
Grant Hopkins was the student marshal in Statistics representing the Statistics Department during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 8, 2022. Hopkins graduates with a master’s degree in Applied Statistics and a bachelor’s degrees in Statistics, Mathematics, and Finance. He collaborated with Associate Professor Le Bao and made several breakthroughs on the early detection of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS).
Anna Leon
Owen Chase was the student marshal for the Eberly College of Science during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 8, 2022. Chase graduates summa cum laude with a 4.0 grade-point average and a bachelor’s degrees in astronomy and astrophysics as well as statistics. He has received numerous awards including the 2021 Astronaut Scholarship, the Homer F. Braddock College of Science Memorial Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the Academic Excellence Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the 2021 Evan Pugh Scholar Award, and the 2020 President Sparks Award. Chase was also a Schreyer Scholar from 2018 to 2022 and was honored with the President’s Freshman Award in 2019. Read more >>

Statistics Department Honors Dennis Lin

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Former Penn State Professor of Statistics Dennis Lin moved to Purdue University in the spring of 2021 to fill the role of Department Head.

Unfortunate for everyone at the time, COVID prevented the department from recognizing Dennis and sending him off in proper fashion. So in early April 2022, only weeks after Penn State lifted its mask mandate, the department brought Dennis back for the long overdue send off!

Friends, colleagues, and a few former students gathered at The Graduate State College to honor Dennis with dinner and conversation while sharing stories of Dennis’ impact on students, the department, and famous sense of humor.

Better late than never, we all wish Dennis great success at Purdue! You are missed, Dennis!

lin dinner

2022 Alumni Updates

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Andreas Artemiou (PhD 2010, adviser: Bing Li) was promoted to Reader in Statistics in the School of Mathematics at Cardiff University, UK. The position of “Reader” in the British system is equivalent to that of a high-level Associate Professor. Congratulations Andreas!

Won Chang (PhD 2014, adviser: Murali Haran) Won will be tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in August 2022 at the University of Cincinnati. Won started a half-year sabbatical in Korea as a visiting scholar, invited by the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea, one of the flagship government-funded research institutes in the country. As well, Won will serve as a moderator for the event, “Asian Forward JSM 2022 Career Development Workshop” at JSM 2022 in Washington D.C.

Kiranmoy Das (PhD 2011, advisers: Rongling Wu and Runze Li) received the 2021 Prof. C. R. Rao National Award in Statistics for Young Statisticians. This prize is awarded by the Government of India and was presented on June 29, 2021. Congratulations to Kiranmoy!

John Hughes (PhD 2011, advisers: John Fricks and Murali Haran) was recently hired as an Associate Professor with tenure in Lehigh University’s new College of Health. In addition to collaborating with new colleagues at Lehigh, John continues doing research on methods for dependent data, Bayesian methods, and statistical computing.

Surajit Ray (PhD 2003, adviser: Bruce Lindsay) was recently promoted to Professor of Statistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests are in the area of model selection, the theory and geometry of mixture models and functional data analysis. Core areas of methodological research include multivariate mixtures, structural equations models, high-dimensional clustering, and functional clustering. Congratulations Surajit on your well-deserved promotion!

James Russell (PhD 2017, advisers: Ephraim Hanks and Murali Haran) James received tenure at Muhlenberg College.

Ji-Ping Wang (PhD 2003, adviser: Bruce Lindsay) is a professor in statistics and adjunct professor in Molecular BioSciences at Northwestern University. He will be starting his third year as Chairperson in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University in fall 2022.

Qing (Wendy) Wang & Ivan Simeonov

Qing (Wendy) Wang & Ivan Simeonov

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Qing (Wendy) Wang

(PhD 2012, adviser: Bruce Lindsay)

Wendy Wang is currently an Associate Professor of Statistics and co-director of the data science program at Wellesley College. Besides teaching undergraduate courses in statistics, she enjoys working with students on statistical research projects. So far, she has supervised over ten students through senior honors theses and summer research programs, and has published six papers with undergraduate coauthors in refereed journals such as Statistics in Medicine, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, and Statistics & Probability Letters. On a personal note, her husband, Ivan Simeonov (PhD in statistics, 2012), and she recently welcomed thei second child in March. Wendy says life has been busier than ever, but in a joyful way. Congratulations to Wendy and Ivan!

Ivan Simeonov

(PhD 2012, advisers: John Fricks and Francesca Chiaromonte)

Ivan is currently working as an Assistant Vice President, Business Insurance Analytics and Research team in Travelers Insurance. He started his career in Personal Insurance (PI) and spent five years and half in various roles, focusing on building models to predict observed pure premium (yearly losses) for auto insurance as well as homeowners’ insurance. Ivan spent the last four years in Business Insurance (BI) and currently I he manages a team of five people. Ivan is responsible for BI Distribution, Sales, and Customer Analytics models. The type of work they perform may involve ad-hoc analysis, model monitoring of implemented models, as well as creating new models with different types of responses (numeric, multinomial, logistic,) as well as predictors (categoricals, high cardinality categorical, free form text, numeric).

Professors emeriti endow Early Career Professorship in Department of Statistics

Professors emeriti endow Early Career Professorship in Department of Statistics

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — It was quite by accident that Hoben Thomas and Thomas Hettmansperger, both newly arrived faculty members at Penn State, met one day in 1967, but the chance meeting sparked a more-than-40-year research collaboration and longstanding family friendship. To honor that friendship, their families, and the important role that the field of statistics played in their lives, they have established the Hoben and Patricia Thomas and Thomas and Ann Hettmansperger Early Career Professorship in Statistics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The endowed position will rotate to promising faculty members in the first decade of their academic careers.

“Back in the early days, I sat in on a Department of Statistics course, and I had a theoretical question I wanted to have answered,” said Thomas. “So I called the fellow who taught the course, but he wasn’t there. At the time, he and Tom shared the same office in McAllister Building, so I got Tom, and that’s how it started.”

Thomas, professor emeritus of psychology, and Hettmansperger, professor emeritus of statistics, published their first paper together in 1973. Over the years, they published several additional papers that have led to novel ways of thinking about cognitive development in children. Some of their research explored problems related to mixture models, which can be used to tease apart information from multiple groups when the data are all mixed together. Their work also addressed challenges with categorizing behavior of children, who often have trouble verbalizing their understanding of cognitive tasks. They further developed statistical methods for analyzing these data.

“Our most recent paper was just published in 2017, so we have published these papers over a span of about 44 years,” said Hettmansperger. “One of our papers resulted in about 10 years of National Science Foundation research grants, which supported many students as well as faculty member and recent department head, Dave Hunter. We held a weekly seminar and brought in visitors from other universities that had been working in that field of research. It was a very productive and exciting research project.”

Read the full story here.

From the Department Head (July 2022)

From the Department Head (July 2022)

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Heartiest congratulations and all our best wishes to our graduates! You managed to persevere through two very difficult years and it was such a thrill to see so many of you at graduation, and to recognize faces without masks. All the best wishes to you as you embark on post Penn State life. Please keep in touch!

The horror of the war in Ukraine has continued for over 100 days now. An unjustified war based on a desire to grab territory seems, like the worldwide COVID pandemic, another throwback to the darkest periods of the early twentieth century. On a positive note, after over two years of seemingly relentless bad news, we seem to be emerging slowly from the darkness and isolation of the pandemic. It is interesting to look back to see how we have been going back-and-forth between what seemed like the end to a new variant taking us back to square one. Last spring I wrote hopefully in this newsletter of returning to the fall of 2021 without masks or a vaccine mandate; we have since had a (federal) vaccine mandate as well as periodic mask mandates, including one that lasted for just one week in June. Now in addition to all of us moving toward some semblance of normalcy, not having COVID dominate all news is itself a relief.

In the department we have begun returning to social events, starting with a winter party on a cold December afternoon. I thought it would be an improvement over a Zoom party or even a masked indoor party (indoor masking was required at the time) but I was nervous that no one would show up. Not only did the department show up in great numbers, most stayed for an entire hour as we mingled and announced graduate student teaching awards. This spring we added two new social events to the calendar. One was a first-time party for Statistics undergraduates. It was a chance to recognize the accomplishments of several of our students and it gave faculty and students a rare opportunity to interact informally outside of the classroom. We also had a really enjoyable and well attended spring party for our graduate students, faculty, and staff. I am planning for these to become fixtures on our calendar. Zoom and other technological innovations have made working from a distance infinitely more convenient but it is apparent from our in-person events that there is no substitute for meeting in person and that we need more unplanned interactions and conversations. (Please see Mike Fleck’s story and photos about our slow move to normalcy.) We hope to have more events in the upcoming year, starting with the fall, and I also hope to have events that engage our alumni. (Alumni: Please reach out to me if you have ideas and would like to participate.)

Our faculty and students are engaged in fundamental statistical and scientific research, and there is a desperate need to make sense of a world awash in data. I have been thinking of ways in which our department can better engage with the world at large by better sharing our research as well as insights we have as statisticians about scientific reasoning and evaluating evidence from data. As an example of a step toward this goal, this upcoming year we will feature public lectures, talks that are targeted at a broad (non-academic) audience. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have suggestions or if you would like to participate in our outreach efforts. This is also a good context in which to highlight the work of our own Dave Hunter, who has been co-teaching with philosophy professor Paula Droege, a new course titled “On Identifying Bias and Falsehood”. You can read the full story here.

We are delighted to welcome five new faculty this fall: three tenure-line faculty – Maggie Niu (previously associate research professor at Penn State), Michael Schweinberger (University of Missouri), and Yubai Yuan (University of California-Irvine), and two teaching faculty – Matt Slifko (High Point University) and Marjorie Bond (Monmouth College). We will have more on our new hires in our next newsletter. We had three faculty leave this year – Ethan Fang and Lynn Lin for Duke Biostatistics, and Kari Lock Morgan for family reasons. The departures of Alice Chersoni and Lorey Burghard are big losses; both have been valuable members of our staff. Many thanks to all our departing faculty and staff for all that they have done for the department and best wishes to them as they move on to new jobs and lives. A very special thanks to Alice for laying the groundwork for this and several previous editions of the newsletter.

Alumni: It’s always fun to catch up on all the activities in and around our department, but it is especially enjoyable to hear from you – please write to us and give us (and your fellow alumni) updates about your lives, both professional and personal. I eagerly look forward to more alumni news updates and highlights in the coming newsletters. Our annual Department of Statistics reception at the Joint Statistical Meetings is back! It is scheduled for Monday Aug 8, 2022, 5:30 – 7 PM EST at the Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, 901 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC, 2000 (Tulip Room – second floor). 

It’s one of the most fun events at every JSM – a wonderful chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones!

To give us an idea of how many to expect, please register at:
https://engage.tassl.com/event/9751

With best wishes,
Murali Haran
University Park, Pennsylvania
July 7, 2022

2021-22 Postdocs

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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.

2021-22 Graduate Honors and Awards

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Elizabeth Eisenhauer

Elizabeth Eisenhauer (PhD advisers: Ephraim Hanks and Matthew Beckman) was awarded the 2021 Harkness Award for outstanding efforts in teaching and scholarly approaches to teaching and learning, especially at the 300 level.

Alyssa Hu

Alyssa Hu (PhD adviser: Dave Hunter) was recognized as the 2021 Runner up for the Harkness Award for her excellence in classroom teaching in lower division courses.

Tobia Boschi

Tobia Boschi (PhD adviser: Francesca Chiaromonte) was awarded the 2021 Award for Support of Undergraduate Instruction for excellence in on-line instruction and service to UP instruction as a teaching assistant.

Bokgyeong Kang

Bokgyeong Kang (PhD advisers: Murali Haran and John Hughes) was awarded the 2021 Award for Support of Graduate Instruction for excellence in support of teaching stochastic processes at the Master’s level.

Claire Kelling

Claire Kelling (PhD adviser: Murali Haran) received the received the 2022 Alumni Association Graduation Dissertation Award. The award provides funding and recognition to outstanding full-time doctor of philosophy students who have passed their comprehensive exams, have received approval of the dissertation topic and are within their final year of enrollment. This award is considered to be among the most prestigious available to Penn State graduate students and recognizes outstanding achievement in scholarship and professional accomplishment.

Roopali Singh

Roopali Singh (PhD adviser: Qunhua Li) received The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) New Researchers Travel Award. The purpose of the ISBA New Researchers Travel Award is to support participation in ISBA Meetings by junior researchers, and is open to any junior researcher.

Roopali presented the work titled “Reference-free deconvolution of cell mixtures in spatial transcriptomics” in Montreal, Canada, in June 2022. This work is jointly supervised by Xiang Zhu and Qunhua Li.

2021 Honorable Mentions

For terrific work in supporting the teaching mission of the Department:
Lower division: Huy Dang
Upper Division: Arun Srinivasan
Graduate: Siddharth Vishwanath

Outstanding Teaching Assistant

Online MAS student Li Zhang is being recognized for her contributions as an outstanding teaching assistant!

Zhang is advised by Mosuk Chow, and in Spring 2021, Zhang graded STAT484 and STAT 485 for online MAS instructor, Tracy Hammel.

About Zhang’s contributions as a TA, Hammel said, “From the beginning of the semester, Li has been responsive and eager to help. She grades promptly and consistently, and she provides thorough feedback for the students. All communications are professional and respectful. She seems to take being a TA seriously and she does her job well.”

Congratulations, Li, and job well done!

Sports Analytics Club places two students in the pros

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A good number of our students indicate an interest in sports statistics. These jobs are extremely difficult to come by for various reasons — few professional teams exist, not all employ a data science team, and those that do, often have fairly small teams. The result is a highly competitive market.

Despite these challenges our Sports Analytics Club (formed in the fall of 2019) has recently placed two of its members in this field. Mallet James (2021) was recently hired as a Data Scientist for the Detroit Pistons and Sameer Sapre (2020) was hired as an Assistant, Baseball Projects, with the Seattle Mariners.

Both graduated with degrees in Data Science. Having one graduate in such a position is nice and having two graduates get such positions is exciting; two in different major sports is truly outstanding. We are thrilled for Mallet and Sameer. These outcomes also provide a pathway for future students who aspire to work in this arena.
Advised by Associate Teaching Professor of Statistics, Andy Wiesner, The Penn State Sports Analytics Club is a student generated organization started in Fall 2019. Students across various academic disciplines contribute to the club success. Two members have successfully gained employment with a major professional sports team in data analytics, while several others have developed informative analytical websites. These sites plus more information such as how to join can be found here on the club’s website.

Shiny Apps Team Successful at Poster Competition

Shiny Apps Team Successful at Poster Competition

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The Department of Statistics’ Shiny App team was successful in the 2021 Undergraduate Research Poster Exhibition hosted this fall by the Eberly College of Science.

Under the guidance of Dennis Pearl and Neil Hatfield in the BOAST program, undergraduate students Shravani Samala, Lydia Bednarczyk, Tina Tu, Jiayue He, Yudan Zhang, and Adam Poleski — were awarded second place in the mathematical sciences category.

Known at the competition as the R Shiny Research Group, the students presented their winning work from the summer, including apps exploring counting techniques, maximum likelihood estimation, probability applications, and chi-square goodness-of-fit testing.

Read the full story here.

2022 Undergraduate Honors and Awards

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Deric Liang (senior, Statistics) was recognized at commencement as Student Marshal among Statistics Majors in the class of 2021.  In addition to Deric’s demonstrated excellence in coursework, he has also been engaged in several research projects, completed an internship, and a number of extracurricular interests.  In 2019, Deric was one of nine students selected for the National Science Foundation Ukraine REU studying the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health survey modeling risk factors for mental health diagnoses.  Deric also worked with Professor Qi Li (Economics) to build a data set of single-family loans from mortgage databases and investigated the extent to which face-to-face lenders may or may not discriminate against minorities compared to algorithmic lenders.  Additionally, Deric completed an internship with Bates White Economic Consulting, worked closely with Professors Francis Wham and Matthew Beckman as an Undergraduate TA in STAT 380, was actively engaged in THON, and has been President of the Penn State Glee Club.  Deric selected Professor Matthew Beckman as Faculty Marshal to escort him at Commencement.

Shunqi Zhang (senior, Data Science) was recognized at commencement as Student Marshal for the Statistical Modeling Data Sciences Major in the class of 2021.  In addition to Shunqi’s demonstrated excellence in coursework, he has also completed an internship, and participated in several research projects.  During Shunqi’s internship with Qingbo Big Data Technology Company he implemented a text mining algorithm to categorize different types of popular events, visualize the public attitude of and trend, and draft a synopsis—an experience that sparked an interest in more advanced study of networks and machine learning.  In 2019, Shunqi joined a team of undergraduate researchers supervised by Professor Dennis Pearl who developed educational web applets using R Shiny for use in statistics education research.  Shunqi then extended this work with a second research project implementing Bayesian Networks to evaluate learning outcomes using log file data from such interactive web applets.  Shunqi selected Professor Dennis Pearl as Faculty Marshal to escort him at Commencement.

Spring 2022 Student Marshals

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Owen Chase
Owen Chase was the student marshal for the Eberly College of Science during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 8, 2022. Chase graduates summa cum laude with a 4.0 grade-point average and a bachelor’s degrees in astronomy and astrophysics as well as statistics. He has received numerous awards including the 2021 Astronaut Scholarship, the Homer F. Braddock College of Science Memorial Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the Academic Excellence Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the 2021 Evan Pugh Scholar Award, and the 2020 President Sparks Award. Chase was also a Schreyer Scholar from 2018 to 2022 and was honored with the President’s Freshman Award in 2019. Read more >>
Grant Hopkins
Grant Hopkins was the student marshal in Statistics representing the Statistics Department during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 8, 2022. Hopkins graduates with a master’s degree in Applied Statistics and a bachelor’s degrees in Statistics, Mathematics, and Finance. He collaborated with Associate Professor Le Bao and made several breakthroughs on the early detection of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS).
Anna Leon
Owen Chase was the student marshal for the Eberly College of Science during Penn State’s spring commencement ceremonies on May 8, 2022. Chase graduates summa cum laude with a 4.0 grade-point average and a bachelor’s degrees in astronomy and astrophysics as well as statistics. He has received numerous awards including the 2021 Astronaut Scholarship, the Homer F. Braddock College of Science Memorial Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the Academic Excellence Scholarship from 2018 to 2022, the 2021 Evan Pugh Scholar Award, and the 2020 President Sparks Award. Chase was also a Schreyer Scholar from 2018 to 2022 and was honored with the President’s Freshman Award in 2019. Read more >>

Statistics Department Honors Dennis Lin

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Former Penn State Professor of Statistics Dennis Lin moved to Purdue University in the spring of 2021 to fill the role of Department Head.

Unfortunate for everyone at the time, COVID prevented the department from recognizing Dennis and sending him off in proper fashion. So in early April 2022, only weeks after Penn State lifted its mask mandate, the department brought Dennis back for the long overdue send off!

Friends, colleagues, and a few former students gathered at The Graduate State College to honor Dennis with dinner and conversation while sharing stories of Dennis’ impact on students, the department, and famous sense of humor.

Better late than never, we all wish Dennis great success at Purdue! You are missed, Dennis!

lin dinner

2022 Alumni Updates

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Andreas Artemiou (PhD 2010, adviser: Bing Li) was promoted to Reader in Statistics in the School of Mathematics at Cardiff University, UK. The position of “Reader” in the British system is equivalent to that of a high-level Associate Professor. Congratulations Andreas!

Won Chang (PhD 2014, adviser: Murali Haran) Won will be tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in August 2022 at the University of Cincinnati. Won started a half-year sabbatical in Korea as a visiting scholar, invited by the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea, one of the flagship government-funded research institutes in the country. As well, Won will serve as a moderator for the event, “Asian Forward JSM 2022 Career Development Workshop” at JSM 2022 in Washington D.C.

Kiranmoy Das (PhD 2011, advisers: Rongling Wu and Runze Li) received the 2021 Prof. C. R. Rao National Award in Statistics for Young Statisticians. This prize is awarded by the Government of India and was presented on June 29, 2021. Congratulations to Kiranmoy!

John Hughes (PhD 2011, advisers: John Fricks and Murali Haran) was recently hired as an Associate Professor with tenure in Lehigh University’s new College of Health. In addition to collaborating with new colleagues at Lehigh, John continues doing research on methods for dependent data, Bayesian methods, and statistical computing.

Surajit Ray (PhD 2003, adviser: Bruce Lindsay) was recently promoted to Professor of Statistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests are in the area of model selection, the theory and geometry of mixture models and functional data analysis. Core areas of methodological research include multivariate mixtures, structural equations models, high-dimensional clustering, and functional clustering. Congratulations Surajit on your well-deserved promotion!

James Russell (PhD 2017, advisers: Ephraim Hanks and Murali Haran) James received tenure at Muhlenberg College.

Ji-Ping Wang (PhD 2003, adviser: Bruce Lindsay) is a professor in statistics and adjunct professor in Molecular BioSciences at Northwestern University. He will be starting his third year as Chairperson in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University in fall 2022.

Qing (Wendy) Wang & Ivan Simeonov

Qing (Wendy) Wang & Ivan Simeonov

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Qing (Wendy) Wang

(PhD 2012, adviser: Bruce Lindsay)

Wendy Wang is currently an Associate Professor of Statistics and co-director of the data science program at Wellesley College. Besides teaching undergraduate courses in statistics, she enjoys working with students on statistical research projects. So far, she has supervised over ten students through senior honors theses and summer research programs, and has published six papers with undergraduate coauthors in refereed journals such as Statistics in Medicine, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, and Statistics & Probability Letters. On a personal note, her husband, Ivan Simeonov (PhD in statistics, 2012), and she recently welcomed thei second child in March. Wendy says life has been busier than ever, but in a joyful way. Congratulations to Wendy and Ivan!

Ivan Simeonov

(PhD 2012, advisers: John Fricks and Francesca Chiaromonte)

Ivan is currently working as an Assistant Vice President, Business Insurance Analytics and Research team in Travelers Insurance. He started his career in Personal Insurance (PI) and spent five years and half in various roles, focusing on building models to predict observed pure premium (yearly losses) for auto insurance as well as homeowners’ insurance. Ivan spent the last four years in Business Insurance (BI) and currently I he manages a team of five people. Ivan is responsible for BI Distribution, Sales, and Customer Analytics models. The type of work they perform may involve ad-hoc analysis, model monitoring of implemented models, as well as creating new models with different types of responses (numeric, multinomial, logistic,) as well as predictors (categoricals, high cardinality categorical, free form text, numeric).

Professors emeriti endow Early Career Professorship in Department of Statistics

Professors emeriti endow Early Career Professorship in Department of Statistics

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — It was quite by accident that Hoben Thomas and Thomas Hettmansperger, both newly arrived faculty members at Penn State, met one day in 1967, but the chance meeting sparked a more-than-40-year research collaboration and longstanding family friendship. To honor that friendship, their families, and the important role that the field of statistics played in their lives, they have established the Hoben and Patricia Thomas and Thomas and Ann Hettmansperger Early Career Professorship in Statistics in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The endowed position will rotate to promising faculty members in the first decade of their academic careers.

“Back in the early days, I sat in on a Department of Statistics course, and I had a theoretical question I wanted to have answered,” said Thomas. “So I called the fellow who taught the course, but he wasn’t there. At the time, he and Tom shared the same office in McAllister Building, so I got Tom, and that’s how it started.”

Thomas, professor emeritus of psychology, and Hettmansperger, professor emeritus of statistics, published their first paper together in 1973. Over the years, they published several additional papers that have led to novel ways of thinking about cognitive development in children. Some of their research explored problems related to mixture models, which can be used to tease apart information from multiple groups when the data are all mixed together. Their work also addressed challenges with categorizing behavior of children, who often have trouble verbalizing their understanding of cognitive tasks. They further developed statistical methods for analyzing these data.

“Our most recent paper was just published in 2017, so we have published these papers over a span of about 44 years,” said Hettmansperger. “One of our papers resulted in about 10 years of National Science Foundation research grants, which supported many students as well as faculty member and recent department head, Dave Hunter. We held a weekly seminar and brought in visitors from other universities that had been working in that field of research. It was a very productive and exciting research project.”

Read the full story here.

From the Department Head (July 2022)

From the Department Head (July 2022)

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Heartiest congratulations and all our best wishes to our graduates! You managed to persevere through two very difficult years and it was such a thrill to see so many of you at graduation, and to recognize faces without masks. All the best wishes to you as you embark on post Penn State life. Please keep in touch!

The horror of the war in Ukraine has continued for over 100 days now. An unjustified war based on a desire to grab territory seems, like the worldwide COVID pandemic, another throwback to the darkest periods of the early twentieth century. On a positive note, after over two years of seemingly relentless bad news, we seem to be emerging slowly from the darkness and isolation of the pandemic. It is interesting to look back to see how we have been going back-and-forth between what seemed like the end to a new variant taking us back to square one. Last spring I wrote hopefully in this newsletter of returning to the fall of 2021 without masks or a vaccine mandate; we have since had a (federal) vaccine mandate as well as periodic mask mandates, including one that lasted for just one week in June. Now in addition to all of us moving toward some semblance of normalcy, not having COVID dominate all news is itself a relief.

In the department we have begun returning to social events, starting with a winter party on a cold December afternoon. I thought it would be an improvement over a Zoom party or even a masked indoor party (indoor masking was required at the time) but I was nervous that no one would show up. Not only did the department show up in great numbers, most stayed for an entire hour as we mingled and announced graduate student teaching awards. This spring we added two new social events to the calendar. One was a first-time party for Statistics undergraduates. It was a chance to recognize the accomplishments of several of our students and it gave faculty and students a rare opportunity to interact informally outside of the classroom. We also had a really enjoyable and well attended spring party for our graduate students, faculty, and staff. I am planning for these to become fixtures on our calendar. Zoom and other technological innovations have made working from a distance infinitely more convenient but it is apparent from our in-person events that there is no substitute for meeting in person and that we need more unplanned interactions and conversations. (Please see Mike Fleck’s story and photos about our slow move to normalcy.) We hope to have more events in the upcoming year, starting with the fall, and I also hope to have events that engage our alumni. (Alumni: Please reach out to me if you have ideas and would like to participate.)

Our faculty and students are engaged in fundamental statistical and scientific research, and there is a desperate need to make sense of a world awash in data. I have been thinking of ways in which our department can better engage with the world at large by better sharing our research as well as insights we have as statisticians about scientific reasoning and evaluating evidence from data. As an example of a step toward this goal, this upcoming year we will feature public lectures, talks that are targeted at a broad (non-academic) audience. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have suggestions or if you would like to participate in our outreach efforts. This is also a good context in which to highlight the work of our own Dave Hunter, who has been co-teaching with philosophy professor Paula Droege, a new course titled “On Identifying Bias and Falsehood”. You can read the full story here.

We are delighted to welcome five new faculty this fall: three tenure-line faculty – Maggie Niu (previously associate research professor at Penn State), Michael Schweinberger (University of Missouri), and Yubai Yuan (University of California-Irvine), and two teaching faculty – Matt Slifko (High Point University) and Marjorie Bond (Monmouth College). We will have more on our new hires in our next newsletter. We had three faculty leave this year – Ethan Fang and Lynn Lin for Duke Biostatistics, and Kari Lock Morgan for family reasons. The departures of Alice Chersoni and Lorey Burghard are big losses; both have been valuable members of our staff. Many thanks to all our departing faculty and staff for all that they have done for the department and best wishes to them as they move on to new jobs and lives. A very special thanks to Alice for laying the groundwork for this and several previous editions of the newsletter.

Alumni: It’s always fun to catch up on all the activities in and around our department, but it is especially enjoyable to hear from you – please write to us and give us (and your fellow alumni) updates about your lives, both professional and personal. I eagerly look forward to more alumni news updates and highlights in the coming newsletters. Our annual Department of Statistics reception at the Joint Statistical Meetings is back! It is scheduled for Monday Aug 8, 2022, 5:30 – 7 PM EST at the Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, 901 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC, 2000 (Tulip Room – second floor). 

It’s one of the most fun events at every JSM – a wonderful chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones!

To give us an idea of how many to expect, please register at:
https://engage.tassl.com/event/9751

With best wishes,
Murali Haran
University Park, Pennsylvania
July 7, 2022