Faculty team Maria Tackett and Nicole Schramm-Sapyta's seven-year project is transforming our understanding and responses to the needs of people navigating Durham’s criminal justice and healthcare systems. Working with student researchers and in collaboration with the Durham County Detention Facility, Justice Services Center, and Duke Health, they’ve compiled one of the most comprehensive datasets of its kind, covering over 23,000 individuals with mental health diagnoses who were locally incarcerated between 2014 and… read more about Behind the Data: Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County »
The University of Zaragoza will honor Alan Gelfand's legacy with a conference "IUMA day on Bayesian analysis: The influence of Alan Gelfand's work". The workshop will feature four sessions with invited speakers, focusing on key areas of Alan Gelfand’s influential contributions. These sessions will cover Spatial analysis, Environmental and ecological processes, and Bayesian methods.In addition to the main sessions, the workshop will include a contributed poster session and a flash talk session,… read more about University of Zaragoza to award Doctor Honoris Causa degree to Alan Gelfand »
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, professor of the practice and the director of undergraduate studies in Statistical Science, has been appointed director of the First-Year Experience in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.Çetinkaya-Rundel will play a pivotal role in overseeing the launch of the First-Year Experience, a signature component of the new Arts & Sciences curriculum being implemented in Fall 2025. All incoming first-year students will participate in the experience through either the longstanding FOCUS program or the… read more about Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel Appointed Director of the First-Year Experience in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences »
We are excited to launch the Duke MSS Alumni Mentorship Program! This program aims to build meaningful, professional connections between current MSS students and alumni working across diverse industries and in academia. We will match current students with alumni mentors who can offer guidance, advice, and support as students navigate academic decisions, career planning, and the transition into the workforce or into PhD programs. If you are interested in joining as an alumni mentor or as a student mentee, please review… read more about MSS Launches Alumni Mentorship Program »
Cynthia D. Rudin, the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, received the 2025 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Organization (IJCAI) McCarthy Award.The award recognizes Rudin’s foundational work on trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI), which is shaping the field of interpretable machine learning and making a major impact on sweeping societal changes. The John McCarthy Award celebrates mid-career researchers who have sparked innovative research… read more about Cynthia Rudin Receives 2025 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence McCarthy Award »
2025 MSS alumna Yicheng “Catherine” Wang served as one of three graduate student representatives from Duke at the NC General Assembly as part of the annual Graduate Education Day. Catherine shared her research — which uses a Bayesian spatial hierarchical model to study flood risk using high resolution environmental data — with legislators and staff.In March 2025, Catherine traveled to Washington, D.C. to the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, where she won the Student Pitch award. She shared her pitch on the Summit’s… read more about MSS alumna Yicheng “Catherine” Wang presents at NC General Assembly's Graduate Education Day »
The Department of Statistical Science is delighted to welcome the following new PhD's to our alumni family: Andrea Aveni, Youngsoo Baek, Yunran Chen, Michael Christensen, Alex Dombowsky, Zeki Kazan, Brian Kundinger, Joseph Lawson, Bo Liu, John Miller, Raphaël Morsomme, Ed Tam, Zhuoqun Wang, Justin Weltz, Xiaojun Zheng, and Yuren Zhou. We also wish to congratulate our PhD BEST Award winner, Aihua Li, and PhD TA of the Year winners Maria Neubrander and Bongjung Sung, along with TA honorable mention winners Kat Husar and… read more about Welcoming Our New PhDs to Our Alumni Family! »
Congratulations to the MSS Class of 2025! Members of this 33-student graduating class are part of an incredibly accomplished group. Several students will be entering top-tier Ph.D. programs, and others will be starting careers in a variety of industry roles, including data scientists, engineers, and analysts at companies like Meta, Eli Lilly, and Liberty Mutual. We wish them continued success in their professional careers, or in continuing their academic journeys.We’d also like to recognize our award winners:2025… read more about Congratulations to Our New MSS Alums! »
Congratulations to our 73 new undergraduate alums on their achievements at Duke! We honored several for their contributions to the department, including 13 graduates with distinction who completed a year-long research project culminating in a senior thesis. The BEST Award, reflecting the role and impact of Bayesian methodology and its application, was won by Jordan Hamelsky for her thesis “Identifying Sociodemographic, Spatial, and Geographic Factors in Durham Associated with Incarceration Using Hierarchical Modeling… read more about Congratulations, Class of 2025! »
The following is a partial list of national, university, school and departmental awards presented to the members of the Class of 2025. In some awards where there are multiple winners, only members of the Class of 2025 are included. read more about Department Honors and Laurels for the Class of 2025 »
Department of Statistical Science Chair Amy Herring has been named Dean of Natural Sciences and Professor of Political Science Kerry Haynie has been appointed to a second term as Dean of Social Sciences, Dean Gary Bennett announced Tuesday. In sharing the announcement, Bennett also expressed his gratitude to Susan Alberts, Robert F. Durden Distinguished Professor of Biology, for her several impactful years as Dean of Natural Sciences. Bennett noted that in returning full time to her research, “Susan is… read more about Herring, Haynie to Lead Natural Sciences, Social Sciences Divisions; Alberts to Return to Research »
We are happy to share that PhD alum and distinguished professor Carlos Carvalho has been named the new President of University of Austin!Read the full announcement. read more about Ph.D Alum Carvalho Named President of University of Austin »
Congratulations to PhD candidate Jennifer Kampe and PhD alumnus Dr. Ed Tam, who were recently awarded the IMS New Researcher Travel Award. Jennifer will graduate in May and has accepted a postdoctoral scholar position at University of Jyväskylä, continuing her work on biodiversity, and Ed is currently a postdoctoral scholar in Biomedical Data Sciences at Stanford University. Both completed their dissertations at Duke under the supervision of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor David Dunson. read more about Kampe and Tam win IMS New Researcher Travel Awards »
Alexander Voclfovsky, associate professor of Statistical Science, is the recipient of the 2025 Gertrude M. Cox Award for excellence in applied statistics. Established in 2003 through a joint agreement between the Washington Statistical Society (WSS) and RTI International, the award annually recognizes an early to mid-career statistician who has made significant contributions in survey methodology, experimental design, biostatistics and/or statistical computing. Volfovsky’s research is at the intersection of theory… read more about Alexander Volfovsky Receives Gertrude M. Cox Award for Excellence in Applied Statistics »
Adway Wadekar is a graduating senior with majors in Mathematics and Statistical Science and a minor in Economics. He has served as a Trinity Ambassador for Statistical Science. Trinity Ambassadors are student volunteers, nominated by their departments, to serve in this unique and important role.We asked a few of the ambassadors from the Class of 2025 to share their favorite memories from Duke. The below interview has been slightly edited for clarity. What was one of the most impactful classes you took during… read more about Notes From the Class of 2025: Making Statistics Stick »
The American Statistical Association (ASA) selected Dr. Kate Calder, Professor and Chair of Statistics and Data Sciences at UT-Austin, as one of 5 recipients of its 2025 Founders Award. She received both her MS (2021) and PhD (2023) at Duke and conducts research in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, Bayesian modeling and computation, multivariate data, and network and relational data analysis. The Founders Award recognizes members who have rendered distinguished service to the association. Dr. Calder has… read more about Alumna Kate Calder Recognized with ASA Founders Award »
Postdoc Changwoo Lee was awarded the "Best Long Talk" prize at BAYSM 2025. Dr. Lee presented the paper "Scalable and robust regression methods for continuous proportional data," motivated by a long-standing collaboration in ecological modeling between Duke University and University of Jväskylä. According to Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor David Dunson, "Changwoo provides a substantial improvement to standard practice, which relies on beta regression. His approach is more robust and leads to substantial… read more about Postdoc Changwoo Lee wins best long talk award at BAYSM! »
Duke Statistical Science is delighted to have two finalists for the Savage Award in Applied Methodology. The Savage Award, named in honor of Leonard J. “Jimmie” Savage, is bestowed each year by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) to two outstanding doctoral dissertations in Bayesian econometrics and statistics: one in Theory and Methods, and one in Applied Methodology. Each award is accompanied by a monetary prize.Postdoc Nicholas Marco is nominated for his thesis “Mixed Membership Models with… read more about Marco and Zito named finalists for Savage Award in Applied Methodology »
Blue Devils fans are still making sense of Duke’s stunning late-game loss to Houston in what was a wild Final Four game.But for some fans of men’s college hoops, predicting this season’s nail-biters, closest contests — and even the biggest blowouts — was a worthwhile competition in itself.In the first-ever Triangle Sports Analytics competition, 15 teams of undergraduates and master’s students from Duke, UNC and NC State competed to make predictions about the 2024/25 ACC basketball season, and in a way most armchair fans don… read more about College Basketball Can Be Hard to Predict. That Didn’t Stop These Student Data Whizzes From Trying »
The MSS program celebrated our annual alumni dinner at the Washington Duke on April 4th. The event, hosted by the MSS GCC, featured an alumni panel sharing experiences from across multiple industries and fields, including State Farm and Trust, as well as retail, consulting, and Ph.D. experience. Department Chair Dr. Amy Herring and Master’s Program Director Dr. Dawn Strickland also shared remarks in support of the MSS program, and current students had the opportunity to network with alumni and faculty over drinks and… read more about Welcome Back, MSS Alumni! »
Sayan Mukherjee, a Professor of Statistical Science, Mathematics, and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, passed away unexpectedly on Monday, March 31. He was 54 years old.Since 2022, Mukherjee was in Germany as the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Artificial Intelligence, a prestigious position shared between Leipzig University and the Max Plank Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. He retained his affiliation with Duke, where he had been a professor since 2004. Prior to Duke, Mukherjee… read more about Duke Mourns the Death of Statistician and Mathematician Sayan Mukherjee »
Duke University has awarded distinguished professorships to 31 faculty members and will recognize them in a ceremony at the Washington Duke Inn on May 14.“I am very proud to recognize these outstanding faculty colleagues with distinguished professorships,” said President Vincent E. Price. “Through their extraordinary scholarship and teaching, they are advancing solutions, inventions and cures that will uplift humankind and make a lasting difference in the world.”Distinguished professorships honor faculty who are well-… read more about Six Trinity Faculty Members Among Duke's New Distinguished Professors »
Yuren Zhou presents his paper, "Bayesian Deep Generative Models for Replicated Networks with Multiscale Overlapping Clusters" at the ENAR Spring Meetings in New Orleans, LA this week. Zhou earned his MSS at Duke before continuing for his PhD. Coauthors on the work are former Duke postdoc Dr. Yuqi Gu, now Assistant Professor at Columbia University, and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor David Dunson. read more about MSS Alum and PhD Student Yuren Zhou wins ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award »
Imagine being able to effortlessly monitor wildlife in real time, continuously gathering information about which species live where, how they interact and how environmental changes affect them. In the midst of a biodiversity crisis — where species are disappearing before they’re even discovered — having such a capability would be groundbreaking for science, conservation and policy.Thanks to a newly funded grant from the National Science Foundation and the Academy of Finland, Arts & Sciences Distinguished… read more about AI-Powered Biodiversity Monitoring: Revolutionizing How We Track Nature’s Hidden Patterns »
PhD candidate Justin Weltz was recently honored with a student travel award from the American Statistical Association Section on Health Policy Statistics for work in collaboration with Angela Yoon, Statistical Science BS '23, Yichi Zhang (Associate Professor, University of Rhode Island), and Duke professors Alex Volfovsky and Eric Laber. Their paper, "Reinforcement Learning for Respondent-Driven Sampling," will be presented in August at the Joint Statistical Meetings. Congratulations for all their hard work! read more about Weltz wins ASA Health Policy Statistics Section Student Paper Award »
Congratulations to MSS alumnus Haoxuan Wang, selected as a winner of the EnviBayes Paper Competition for his work “Annotation Aggregation of Multi-Label Ecological Datasets via Bayesian Modeling.” He will present his paper at the 2025 EnviBayes Workshop at Texas A&M University in October. Haoxuan is currently completing his PhD studies at Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His MSS research was part of the Lifeplan project in collaboration with Professor David Dunson at Duke… read more about MSS Alum Wang Wins EnviBayes Award »
“One could argue that this started over 25 years ago.” That’s how Steffen Bass described his collaboration with Assistant Professor of Statistical Science Simon Mak. Twenty-five years ago, however, Mak wasn’t even in high school.But this isn’t the story of a teenage prodigy. This is the story of how new tools, developed by a junior scientist thinking outside the box, can shed light on old questions — even if the questions are hidden within something smaller than an atom. Steffen… read more about From Nuclear Collisions to AI: How Machine Learning is Revolutionizing Nuclear Physics »
Ph.D. student Caitrin Murphy is the winner of the first place student paper award in the American Statistical Association’s Medical Devices and Diagnostics Section for her work “Functional Principal Component Analysis for Censored Data” in collaboration with James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Statistical Science Eric Laber and collaborators Rhonda Merwin, Brian Reich and Jake Koerner. The objective of the Section on Medical Devices and Diagnostics (MDD) is to serve Association members with special interests in… read more about Ph.D. Student Caitrin Murphy Wins First Place for ASA Paper »
Postdoctoral scholar Federica Stolf has been awarded an SBSS Student Paper Award for her paper Infinite Joint Species Distribution Models in collaboration with Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor David Dunson. The award is given by the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science (SBSS) of the ASA, which provides a forum for statisticians and people who have interest in the Bayesian paradigm. The broad objectives of the Section are: to encourage research on theory and methods of statistical inference and decision… read more about Postdoctoral Scholar Federica Stolf Receives SBSS Student Paper Award »