Statistical Science
Jerry Sacks, Professor Emeritus of Statistical Science, passed away in early 2023. Jerry was a leader of the statistics profession whose impact on the research community and national research infrastructure has had a broad and sustained impact. Jerry joined the Duke faculty in 1992 while serving as the founding Director of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and moved full-time to Duke in 2001. Jerry was an active and valued colleague long past his retirement from Duke and his move to… read more about Remembering Jerry Sacks »
Thank you to Zachary Abzug of Vectra AI and Dan Salo of Proofpoint for the outstanding seminar on cloud computing in machine learning production at Duke Statistical Science that kicked off this semester’s Proseminar series. Your comprehensive discussion and demonstrations on the role of cloud platforms were insightful and greatly appreciated by all attendees, including undergraduates, Master's, and Ph.D. students. An additional shoutout to Richard Zink of Lexitas… read more about Spring 2023 Proseminar Series Kicks Off! »
Yuansi Chen, assistant professor of Statistical Science, and Kevin Welsher, associate professor of Chemistry, have been named Sloan Research Fellows for 2023. Awarded annually since 1955, Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most prestigious awards available to U.S. and Canadian researchers. Yuansi Chen Chen’s research focuses on sampling algorithms – procedures that allow us to draw samples out of a distribution or population. They give us a glimpse into the unknown, whether the unknown is… read more about Two Trinity Faculty Named 2023 Sloan Research Fellows »
Yuansi Chen, Assistant Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The award supports outstanding young faculty members in their efforts to build a successful research enterprise. For the next five years, the NSF CAREER award will support Chen's work on the analysis of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms that arise in high dimensional Bayesian statistical inference problems.… read more about Yuansi Chen awarded NSF CAREER grant »
Four Duke Statistical Science graduate students were among the winners of the American Statistical Association’s Student Paper Competition. By winning the competition, these students will receive travel awards to attend the upcoming 2023 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Elizabeth (Betsy) Bersson Bersson, a Ph.D. student advised by Professor Peter Hoff, won in the Social Statistics (SSS), Government Statistics (GSS), and Survey Research Methods (SRMS)… read more about StatSci Students Recognized for Research Articles »
The Statistical Science department at Duke celebrated the Lunar New Year in style with a delicious feast, which brought together StatSci undergrads, Masters students, Ph.D. candidates, and faculty for a festive start to the Year of the Rabbit. Thanks to everyone who organized and participated, especially Dr. Li Ma, Dr. Jason Xu, and Lori Rauch. Cheers to good luck, prosperity, and happiness in the coming year! read more about Happy Lunar New Year from Duke Statistical Science! »
StatSci Professor Jerry Reiter has been awarded the prestigious 2022 Links Lecture Award and will present his lecture later this month. Reiter's talk, "Protecting Privacy in a Blended Data World," will be delivered Tuesday, Jan. 24 at noon. To listen to this free, virtual lecture, you need to pre-register via this link, after which you will receive a confirmation, invitation email from Zoom. Reiter will discuss integration of data from multiple sources, often known as data blending, which… read more about Jerry Reiter Receives ASA's Links Lecture Award »
Senior Statistical Science major Jenny Huang has won a $50,000 Quad Fellowship to pursue her doctoral studies in the United States next year. Named one of the 100 Quad Fellows in the inaugural group, Jenny will be part of a network for scholars from the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, designed to strengthen ties and shared STEM expertise between the four countries. Jenny's other major is Computer Science and she has a minor in math. She was selected last year as a 2022 Faculty Scholar. Congratulations… read more about Senior Jenny Huang of Statistical Science to receive new Quad Fellowship for doctoral study »
The Department of Statistical Science congratulates our three December MSS graduates: Ying Xin, Tiancheng Pan, and Haoming Yang! Portfolio Research Topics: Ying Xin – "Image Classification on Avengers Faces Dataset” Tiancheng Pan – “Reinforcement Learning on Classification to Scheduling Patients” Haoming Yang – Interpretable AI for Relating Brain Structural and Function Connections. Ying and Tiancheng are pursuing careers in private industry and Haoming will be joining the ECE Ph.D. program here at… read more about Congratulations to our December MSS Graduates! »
One Duke alumna and a Duke senior have been named in the inaugural class of Quad Fellows, a new scholarship that provides funding for graduate research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). This scholarship is supported by the governments of the United States, India, Australia, and Japan. Alumna Raahina Malik, and current senior Jenny Huang will be a part of a cohort of 100 masters and doctoral STEM students studying in the United States. The fellowship develops a network of science and… read more about Alumna, Senior Selected for New Quad Fellowship in STEM Fields »
StatSci Assistant Professor Alexander Fisher has been recognized with a Publisher’s Award for Excellence in Systematic Research for a paper he had published in “Systematic Biology” as a graduate student. Announced last month, the annual award is presented to the two best papers based on student research published in the journal during the previous year. The lead author must have been a student at the time the research was conducted. Fisher’s paper, “Relaxed Random Walks at Scale,” was among the more than 400… read more about Fisher Receives Publisher's Award for Excellence in Systematic Research »
DURHAM, N.C. -- “How many fingers am I holding up?” For vision-sensing brain cells in a monkey’s visual cortex, that answer depends on whether the digits are next to each other or partially overlapping. A new study from Duke University finds that single neurons conveying visual information about two separate objects in sight do so by alternating signals about one or the other. When two objects overlap, however, the brain cells detect them as a single entity. The new report is out Nov. 28 in the journal eLife. The… read more about Brain Cells Use A Telephone Trick To Report What They See »
Ph.D. student Xiaojun Zheng (with advisor Assistant Professor Simon Mak) received the Best Student Paper Award at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting. Their paper, “PERCEPT: a new online change-point detection method using topological data analysis”, proposes a new topology-aware online change detection approach for monitoring high-dimensional data streams, with applications to solar flare detection and human gesture monitoring. This award recognized outstanding papers… read more about Xiaojun Zheng Received Best Student Paper Award »
Three researchers with ties to Duke's Department of Statistics have received the newly-established Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award. The award recognizes outstanding junior Bayesian researchers based on their overall contribution to the field and to the community. This year's winners include: Duke Assistant Professor of Statistical Science Simon Mak, John Hopkins Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Duke doctoral alumni Aki Nishimura, and Texas A&M Assistant Professor of Statistics and… read more about Junior Researchers Receive Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award »
StatSci Professor Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel discusses data science pedagogy on the recent episode of the Stats + Stories podcast. The episode’s focus, according to Stats + Stories, is how “in the past, Introduction to Statistics classes spent a lot of time covering distribution tables, teaching students to run stats by hand and focusing on statistical procedures. However, educators are continually considering new ways to teach stats, and the increasing popularity of data science makes it a more urgent… read more about Stats + Stories podcast hosts Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel on data science pedagogy »
Five MSS students received the Dean’s Research Award from The Graduate School this semester: Eric Bai (MSS ’23), Yicheng Shen (MSS ’24), Xinran Song (MSS ’23), Jiongran Wang (MSS ’23), and Xiaozhu Zhang (MSS ’23). This highly competitive award provides funding for students to pursue research opportunities, necessary research tools and programs, and conference attendance. These students will utilize their awards to pursue research on a myriad of topics including mortality predictions via medical texts, analyzing Twitter data… read more about MSS Students Receive Dean’s Research Award »
PhD student Xiaojun Zheng (with advisor Assistant Professor Simon Mak) received the Best Student Paper Award at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting. Their paper, “PERCEPT: a new online change-point detection method using topological data analysis”, proposes a new topology-aware online change detection approach for monitoring high-dimensional data streams, with applications to solar flare detection and human gesture monitoring. This award recognizes outstanding papers… read more about PhD Student Receives INFORMS Best Student Paper Award »
DURHAM, N.C. – Two Duke University seniors were among the recipients selected this weekend for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Qi Xuan Khoo and Shreyas Hallur were chosen from among many applicants from colleges and universities. Hallur received one of the 32 scholarships available to students from the United States, while Khoo won the only scholarship available to Malaysian citizens. The scholarships provide all expenses for two or three years of study at the University of Oxford in England. Recipients are selected… read more about Two Duke Seniors Win Rhodes Scholarships »
Big thanks to our amazing faculty (Dr. Banks and Dr. Jiang), post-docs (Dr. Matuk) and Ph.D students (Evan Knox, Yunran Chen, Raphael Morsomme) for volunteering their time to review provide feedback on the Ph.D. applications of our undergraduate and Master’s students. Mentors gave feedback about where to apply, application tricks, and how to make CVs and statements of purpose stronger. Students found it very helpful and really appreciated this in-house care! read more about Students Prepare for Ph.D. Applications with Review Session »
Statistical Science Professor Jerry Reiter presented the 2022 Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Lecture on November 3 at Penn State University. Reiter spoke on the topic: “Is There a Future for Public Use Data?” Sponsored by Penn State’s departments of statistics and sociology, the annual Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Lecture honors a researcher who has made distinguished contributions at the intersection of statistics and social science. The lecture is in memory of the late Clifford C. Clogg – a distinguished professor of… read more about Jerry Reiter Delivers 2022 Clogg Memorial Lecture »
Recruiters recently returned to campus for an in-person STEM-focused career fair, co-sponsored by the Master’s of Statistical Science and Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science Programs. Almost 20 employers were welcomed to campus, including IBM, Amazon, Cameo, and Humana, among others. Employers searching for students to fill both internship and full-time employment positions were able to connect with over 300 students from the MSS and MIDS programs, as well as graduate students from Electrical & Computer Engineering… read more about Inaugural MSS/MIDS Career Fair – Resume Book available »
The Duke University Master's and Ph.D. of Statistical Science programs are actively recruiting students for Fall 2023 enrollment. We will host a virtual admissions information and Q&A session on Thursday, October 26 from 1:00-3:00 EDT (register here). At this session, students will have an opportunity to hear about both programs as well as chat with current students to hear about their experiences. The Zoom link for the event is here. See below for more information about each program… read more about Virtual MSS & Ph.D. Admissions Session »
As a first-year student at Duke, Brooke Harmon didn’t know she would need a mentor – or two, or three – to help guide her through college. But what she didn’t look for, she found nevertheless. Now a senior, Harmon boasts an important, vast and diverse web of friends, confidants, advisers and mentors who she has leaned on throughout her collegiate journey. This group – a personal, informal board of directors of sorts – has proven valuable to Harmon and is the sort of support system Duke’s career counselors and other student… read more about On Students Finding Advice and Help Along the Duke Journey »
Big thanks to Jeffrey Baker and GOURAV GHOSHAL of Wells Fargo for joining our Duke Statistical Science proseminar and sharing valuable information about entry-level data scientists opportunities at Wells Fargo and their work in Analytics and AI ML Center of Excellence (CoE). It was a well-attended (by both Master's and undergraduate students) interactive session with hands-on case studies and activities. read more about Wells Fargo Recruitment Session »
