The Department of Statistical Science will have a new faculty member in 2015, Rebecca or Beka Steorts! Steorts received her Ph.D. in 2012 from the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida under the supervision of Malay Ghosh, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon prior to joining StatSci.
She is a recipient of the Graduate Alumni Fellowship Award (2007-2010) from the University of Florida and the U.S. Census Bureau Dissertation Fellowship Award (2010-2011). In 2011, she was awarded the UF Innovation through Institutional Integration Program (I-Cubed) and NSF for development of an introductory Bayesian course for undergraduates. Steorts received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Leonard J Savage Award for best dissertation in the Applications & Methodology.
Steorts' interests are in computationally scalable approaches to social science applications, where she focuses on recovering high dimensional objects from degraded data and determining how to recover the underlying structure. Methods used for this are entity resolution, small area estimation, locality sensitive hashing, and privacy-preserving record linkage as applied to medical studies, FMRI studies, human rights violations, and estimation of poverty rates in hard to reach domains. Her research on record linkage was recently funded by the John Templeton Foundation, MetaKnowledge Network Grants Awarded, November 2014 and she is looking for a postdoc to join her research group!
Beka will be joining the StatSci May 2015.
Statistical Science
