Research Teams for Graduation with Distinction

Students considering pursuing Graduation with Distinction should connect with potential faculty advisors during the Spring semester of your junior year and must identify an advisor by the end of that semester. You should explore the web pages of the Statistical Science faculty to get the flavor of their current research activities and contact the professors directly for discussion and further information. To help get you started, department faculty have provided example topics below, and they are always interested in hearing about your own project ideas as well.

Note: Students working with visiting faculty should also identify a co-advisor from the regular Statistical Science faculty.

Professor & Potential Project Topics

David Banks
  • Agent-based models
  • Bayesian game theory
  • Text Mining
  • Dynamic Network Models
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel 
  • Statistics and data science education
  • Statistical computing
  • Data visualization
  • Spatial statistics
Cliburn Chan
  • Computational immunology
  • Statistical methodology for immunological laboratory techniques
  • Informatics of the immune system
James Clark
  • Forest responses to global change-exchange of water, CO2, and energy
  • Impact of co-infection of multiple pathogens on multiple hosts
  • Inference on demography and health of natural populations
Merlise Clyde
  • Model uncertainty: model selection & model averaging
  • Applications in neuroscience, chemistry, genetic-epidemiology, astronomy, environmental statistics
David Dunson
  • Statistical methods for studying exposure disease relationships
  • Brain connection networks
  • Statistical ecology - studying species communities & biodiversity 
  • Methods for dimensionality reduction - inferring latent structure in data
  • Models for dependent data - multivariate, temporal, spatial, etc 
Alexander Fisher
  • Bayesian phylogenetics
  • Scalable algorithms
Amy Herring
  • Health data science and biostatistics
  • Applications in reproductive health, maternal and child health, and environmental health
  • Methods for missing data
  • Dimension reduction methods
  • Longitudinal or correlated data
Peter Hoff
  • Building network datasets from text
  • Interfacing R with data-gathering sensors Internet Security
Ed Iversen
  • Statistical methods in genetics and genomics
  • Cancer risk assessment
  • Radiation Bio-Dosimetry
Fan Li
  • Causal inference
  • Comparative effectiveness research
  • Health policy
Li Ma 
  • High-dimensional inference
  • Adaptive multi-resolution inference
  • Applications in genetics
Simon Mak
  • Big data methods
  • Machine learning
  • Experimental design
  • e-commerce
  • Applications in mechanical, biomedical, and financial engineering
     
Jonathan Mattingly
  • Probability and statistics on networks
Sayan Mukherjee
  • Statistics and genomics
  • Statistical machine learning
Galen Reeves
  • Signal processing, statistics, and information theory
Jerry Reiter
  • Statistics in policy and government
  • Methods for protecting data confidentiality
  • Methods for handling missing data
Cynthia Rudin
  • Machine learning and interpretability
  • Causal inference and uncertainty quantification
  • Applications, including social science
Colin Rundel 
  • Spatial statistics with an emphasis on biological and ecological systems
  • Computational methods
Scott Schmidler
  • Statistical estimation in scientific models: biology, chemistry, and physics
  • Statistics in finance and decision making/portfolio theory
  • Simulation and statistical inference for SDEs
Beka Steorts
  • Record linkage
  • Machine learning
  • Privacy
  • Clustering
Maria Tackett
  • Statistics Education
  • Statistics in forensics science
Surya Tokdar
  • Nonparametric statistics
  • Statistics in the neurosciences
  • Counting missing hurricanes
Alex Volfovsky
  • Social Network Analysis
  • Causal Inference
Mike West 
  • Time series
  • Decision analysis
  • Economics/financial & business applications
Robert Wolpert
  • Uncertainty quantification in cosmology & astrophysics
  • Stochastic processes, random fields, & their applications
  • Theory & practice of Bayesian synthesis of evidence & information
  • Modeling of hazard and risk
Hau-Tieng Wu
  • Physiological signal processing with manifold learning and time-frequency analysis
  • Analyze multimodule physiological signals based on the common manifold model
  • Statistical analysis of the developed machine learning and time-frequency analysis algorithms
  • Application to medical problems from cardiology, sleep, anesthesiology, ICU, etc
Jason Xu
  • Inference for stochastic processes
  • Optimization and Machine Learning
  • Clustering