Statistical ScienceDuke StatSci alumna Lurdes Inoue (PhD, 1999) has been named the chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington. The announcement of her appointment is available at https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/lurdes-inoue-appointed-chair-biostatistics. read more about PhD alum Lurdes Inoue named chair of Biostatistics at Washington »
Professor Amy Herring is the recipient of the 2019 Janet L. Norwood Award. The award recognizes outstanding career achievement by a woman in the statistical sciences. Herring will be honored at a dinner September 10 in Birmingham, and will meet with students and young faculty at The University of Alabama - Birmingham. More details on the award are at https://www.soph.uab.edu/awards/norwoodaward/eighteenth. read more about Amy Herring receives Janet L. Norwood Award »
Simon Mak (and collaborators from the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech) received the 2019 Statistics in Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) Award from the ASA, for the paper “An Efficient Surrogate Model for Emulation and Physics Extraction of Large Eddy Simulations”. The SPES Award is awarded annually to a distinguished paper for its innovative use of statistics to solve a high-impact problem in the physical and engineering sciences. This paper is published in the Journal of the American Statistical… read more about Simon Mak receives SPES Award »
Robert Wolpert has been named the 2019 Cornell Distinguished Alum recipient. An announcement of the award is at https://stat.cornell.edu/cornell-celebration-statistics-and-data-science-2019/robert-l-wolpert. read more about Robert Wolpert named Cornell Distinguished Alum »
David Dunson and colleagues received the 2018 Mitchell Prize for their paper, Bayesian Semiparametric Mixed Effects Markov Models With Application to Vocalization Syntax. The paper appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The Mitchell Prize is awarded in recognition of an outstanding paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem. read more about David Dunson receives the 2018 Mitchell Prize »
Shawn joins us from Lansing, Michigan where he received his doctoral degree in Statistics at Michigan State University. He served as instructor at Michigan State University for the 2018-2019 academic year, where he taught a Computational Statistics course and he developed a data science course for the department's new Data Science degree program. Shawn's interests include Statistical computing and data science, Statistics education, Inference of high-dimensional dependent data, & Applied problems in finance,… read more about Shawn Santo joins Statistical Science »
Ken Land, a professor of sociology at Duke and long time friend of the Department of Statistical Science, has received the Eric Siegel Award for being the best book reviewed in 2018 in the journal Technometrics. The book is Biodemography of Aging: Determinants of Healthy Life Span and Longevity, published in 2016 by Springer. Ken's co-authors include Anatoliy Yashin and Eric Stallard. Congratulations, Ken! read more about Friend of StatSci and Duke sociology professor Ken Land gets Technometrics award »
Simon joined Statistical Science as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2019, after a one-year post-doc at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2018 (majoring in Statistics, minoring in Operations Research), and his B.Sc. from Simon Fraser University in 2013 (majoring in Statistics and Actuarial Science). His interests include (but not limited to) developing practical methodologies with theoretical guarantees for “big data” and “small data” analytics, both of which are important for… read more about Simon Mak joins Statistical Science »
Congratulations to alum Jouchi Nakajima (PhD 2012) on his new position as Head of the Macro Modeling Unit, Research and Statistics Department, Bank of Japan. read more about Congratulations to Jouchi Nakajima on his new position at Bank of Japan »
Bob Eisinger received his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has spent the last three years teaching at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. His research interests include statistical inference on categorical data, statistical computing, and applied statistics. He will be teaching STA 111/130 in Fall 2019. Bob's office will be in 204 Old Chemistry so please stop by and introduce yourself and welcome him to the department. read more about Bob Eisinger joins Statistical Science »
Congratulations to Susan Paddock, Ph.D. 1999, who recently was appointed Executive VP and Chief Statistician at NORC at the University of Chicago. read more about Susan Paddock Appointed Executive Vice President and Chief Statistician at NORC, University of Chicago »
Duke Magazine ran a story on PhD alumnus Kristian Lum, describing her work on algorithmic fairness. A link to the story is at https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/how-kristian-lum-ms-08-phd-10-makes-data-matter read more about PhD alumnus Kristian Lum in Duke magazine »
Alan Gelfand has been named the recipient of the 2019 Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award. The Wilks Memorial Award is awarded by the American Statistical Association. The selection criteria state, “The Wilks Award is bestowed upon a distinguished individual who has made statistical contributions to the advancement of scientific or technical knowledge, ingenious application of existing knowledge, or successful activity in the fostering of cooperative scientific efforts that have been directly involved in… read more about Alan Gelfand receives Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award »
Undergraduate awardWinner: Bihan Zhuang (pictured here) for her research on Entity resolution with an application to the El Salvador conflict Honorable mention: Srini Sunil (pictured here) for his research on Bayesian forecasting and decision theory. Master’s awardWinner: J.C. Lazzaro (pictured here) for his research on Forecasting the term structure of interest rates: A Bayesian dynamic graphical modeling approach… read more about 2019 BEST Award Winners »
Each year the Department of Statistical Science honors three outstanding teaching assistants for their strong contributions to the educational mission of the department. Teaching assistants are a vital part of our educational program, helping students in many ways ranging from teaching their own weekly lab sessions to providing individualized tutoring in office hours, and in many cases even preparing their own instructional materials and covering lectures when instructors are called away to present at conferences or in… read more about 2019 TA Award Winners »
Mike West is the distinguished speaker at the annual Spring Lecture Series in the Mathematical Sciences at the University of Arkansas, April 18-20th 2019. The NSF-supported Spring Lecture Series in the Mathematical Sciences has been running annually since 1977. This is the first time that the focus has been on topics in statistics. More details of the broader conference as well as Mike’s lectures are available from the conference web site. read more about Mike West is distinguished speaker in Mathematical Sciences Spring Lecture Series »
Over the past year I have had the privilege to work on an interdisciplinary Bass-Connections team working to quantify gerrymandering. Our aim is to turn gerrymandering from a subjective discussion about how squiggly a district looks, into a rigorous mathematically formulated problem. At a high level, we try to define what a ‘normal’ , non-partisan map would look like. This gives a baseline to compare an enacted plan to. We do this by constructing tens of thousands of maps of North Carolina. These maps follow all of the… read more about Statistical Science undergraduate Jacob Shulman at the Supreme Court! »
Professor David Dunson will deliver one of the Medallion lectures at the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings. The Medallion lectures are sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). They are one of the IMS's highest honors. For a summary of the award and the topic of Professor Dunson's lecture, see the latest issue of the IMS bulletin. read more about David Dunson to deliver 2019 IMS Medallion lecture »
The Department of Statistical Science at Duke University is inviting applications for a Postdoctoral Associate in statistical science with Professor Rebecca Steorts (https://resteorts.github.io/. The Associate will work on methodological research related to one or more of the following topics, depending on the candidate's interests: (1) entity resolution (record linkage and de-duplication), including building new methodology for entity resolution and evaluating such method on both simulated and real data, (2) exploring… read more about The Department of Statistical Science at Duke University is inviting applications for a Postdoctoral Associate »
If you're an undergraduate at Duke and a female and doing research at Duke, I would like to encourage you to apply to give a spotlight presentation at Duke Undergraduate Machine Learning Day. http://dukeml.org/ml-day.html MS and PhD students can also apply, but first priority will be given to undergraduate students. If you're interested in giving a poster presentation on your work, I'd also like to encourage you to submit a poster based upon your research at this event. There will be prizes to all the top spotlight… read more about Machine Learning Day - Saturday, March 23, 2019 News »
Statistical Science Major James Chenyang Wang is a data storyteller at Duke and an incoming product analyst at Thumbtack. He loves slide tacklings in soccer. Read his article on Data Science on STATtr@k. read more about So, You’ve Decided to Study Data Science … Now What? »
Justice by the Numbers: Meet the Statistician trying to fix Bias in Criminal Justice Algorithms When the underlying data they rely on is incomplete—and it often is—the growing use of machine learning tools in America's criminal justice system can have devastating effects read more about Alumna Kristian Lum in the News »
Abbas Zaidi was awarded Best Student Paper award titled Gaussian Process Mixtures for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects The Business and Economic Statistics Section (B&E) of the American Statistical Association (ASA) offers this award for student members in doctoral programs in business, economics, econometrics, statistics, or… read more about Abbas Zaidi receives JSM 2019 Best Student Paper Award »
Please save the date for DataFest 2019, which will be held over the April 5-7 weekend at Penn Pavillion. More information to follow in the next month. We'll post updates at https://www2.stat.duke.edu/datafest/ read more about DataFest 2019 has been scheduled! »
Cracking the Code on Credit Cards at Datathon 2018 read more about Datathon 2018 Feature Story »
Mike West, the Arts & Sciences Professor of Statistics & Decision Sciences in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University, is the recipient of the 2018 Akaike Memorial Lecture Award. Professor West, was selected to receive the award and present the Akaike Memorial Lecture at the Japanese Joint Statistical Meetings in Tokyo this September. The Award recognized Mike as “one of the pioneers who have led the field of the Bayesian statistics” and who has “significantly influenced the development of the… read more about Mike West Receives Akaike Award »
DURHAM, N.C. -- Since it began in 2011, the Syrian Civil War has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. But as the conflict continues, many monitoring groups say they are starting to lose count of the bodies. Realities on the ground make it increasingly hard to pinpoint precise numbers -- so much so that in 2014 the United Nations announced it would stop updating its death toll due to accuracy concerns. But some researchers are determined to do the best they can to keep Syria’s death count -- which may have reached half… read more about Making Sense of Syria's Murky Death Toll »
The University of Florida recognized alumnus Beka Steorts for her statistical work on humanitarian efforts, specifically regarding the ongoing conflict in Syria. https://publications.clas.ufl.edu/ytori-magazine/ytori-fall-2017/beka-steorts/ Beka was also featured in Duke Today about her 5 years using machine learning to assess the death toll in the Syrian Civil War. https://today.duke.edu/2018/09/making-sense-syrias-murky-death-toll read more about Beka Steorts Uses Stats for Humanitarian Purposes »
Alumnus Anirban Bhattacharya, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, won the Noether Young Scholar Award at this the recent JSM conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on his paper titled Bayesian Alpha-Posteriors and Alpha-Variational Bayes. read more about Alumnus Anirban Bhattacharya with Noether Young Scholar Award »
The Department of Statistical Science at Duke University invites applications for open rank faculty position as Professor of the Practice to begin in Fall 2019. This position is a regular rank faculty with a term renewable appointment. Preference will be given to candidates demonstrating outstanding teaching and strong interests in data science education and developing and growing our undergraduate major in Statistical Science and interdepartmental major in Data Science. The Department is an internationally recognized… read more about Open Rank Professor of the Practice »