Statisticians from around the globe recently convened in Venice, Italy for the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) World Meeting, and numerous Duke scholars were honored for their achievements.
Professor Li Ma was recognized as an ISBA Fellow at the gala dinner and awards ceremony. Professor Ma is known for his work on nonparametric modeling and inference, multi-scale inference, recursive partitioning and tree-related methods, and statistical modeling of microbiome sequencing data and flow cytometry. He joins Duke Professors Emeriti Jim Berger, Alan Gelfand, and Robert Wolpert as well as Professors Merlise Clyde, David Dunson, Amy Herring, and Mike West in the group of fellows. Former Duke Professor Giovanni Parmigiani and former Duke visiting scholar Professor Francesca Dominici of Harvard University joined Professor Ma in this year’s class of fellows. ISBA Fellows are named in even-numbered years and honor members who have made outstanding contributions in some aspect of statistical work.
Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor David Dunson, along with collaborators Dr. Daniele Durante (former Duke visiting scholar now at Bocconi University), Dr. Tommaso Rigon (former Duke postdoctoral scholar now at University of Milan-Bicocca), and Dr. Sirio Legramanti (University of Bergamo) received the Mitchell Prize for their work “Extended stochastic block models with application to criminal networks,” published in 2022 in Annals of Applied Statistics. The Mitchell Prize is awarded in recognition of an outstanding paper describing how a Bayesian approach has been used to solve an important applied problem and is jointly sponsored by the American Statistical Association’s Section on Bayesian Statistical Science, ISBA, and the Mitchell Prize Founders’ Committee. Duke faculty members are no strangers to this honor, which was also awarded to papers by Professor Dunson in 2018 and 2017, Professor Lin Lin in 2016, and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor Mike West in 2012, 1997, and 1994.
Numerous Duke-affiliated junior scholars were honored with poster awards for their research presentations, including current postdocs Changwon Lee and Ganchao Wei; current and former students Yunran Chen, Yiwei Gong, Aihua Li, Manny Mokel, Braden Scherting, and Christine Shen; and former visiting scholars Davide Agnoletto, Louise Alamichel, and Federica Stolf. Current Ph.D. student Benedetta Bruni was honored with a poster award at the j-ISBA satellite meeting, also held in Venice.
Congratulations to all our outstanding researchers!
