NCSU Statistics graduate student, Josh Katz, recent research on regional dialects has gotten him National attention from various media sources.
Category Archives: Awards
Faculty & Staff Awards
I am extremely pleased to share with you some very exciting news to celebrate our bright and talented students, superb faculty, and extraordinary staff.
Let me start with Alison McCoy. She is one of inaugural recipients of the “Give a Shout Out to Staff” award, this is a new program from the Staff Senate to celebrate staff members who make NC State a great place to work and deserve praise for going above and beyond the call of duty. Certainly, that is our Alison! The nomination for Alison came from our wonderful students, who very much recognize the great service of our fantastic staff.
Sujit Ghosh has been awarded the “2013 Thammasat Honorary Plaque” in recognition of his continuous and outstanding contribution to Thammasat University. This award is given annually to selected alumni, individuals and organizations who have contributed greatly to the esteem and prestige of the University. Then award ceremony event will he held on June 27th, 2013. We will post some pictures in our website!
More exciting news: Butch Tsiatis has been awarded an extremely competitive award from the National Institutes of Health NIH (a new R-01), to work on a very exciting initiative while pursuing a new direction in his extremely successful research. His very well received initiative by NIH is to work on the development of Statistical Methods for Complex Data in Cardiovascular Diseases. This grant is another fruitful outcome of the partnership of our Department and Duke, under the great leadership of Butch and Marie.
Please, join us in congratulating Alison, Sujit, and Butch, for these very well deserved recognitions and accomplishments, while expressing our gratitude for all that they do for our great Department!!
Dan Solomon – Paul Minton Service Award 2013
Very pleased to inform you that Dan Solomon, our Dean and faculty member in our Department, has been selected the winner of the 2013 Paul Minton Service Award to recognize outstanding service to the statistics profession. The award was established to honor Paul Minton, who served the statistics profession nationally and in the southern region for many years and was instrumental in the continued development of statistical education in the region represented by Southern Regional Council on Statistics (SRCoS).
The award will be presented at the summer conference, which will take place this year June 2-5 at Montgomery Bell State Park near Nashville, TN. The award ceremony will be part of the Tuesday June 4 banquet.
Dr. Montserrat Fuentes – 2013 Equity for Women Award
The Faculty Category of the 2013 Equity of Women Award goes to Dr. Montserrat Fuentes, Head of the Department of Statistics for her major contributions to the equity and well-being of women at NC State.
Within her department, Dr. Fuentes recently promoted the establishment of a new Leave Policy for faculty that complements the University’s policies. This family-friendly policy allows for better work-life balance by allowing eligible full-time faculty to adjust course workloads accommodating family-related events such as child birth.
At the university level, Dr. Fuentes worked tirelessly on the Faculty Senate and is personally responsible for the new Parental Leave Policy for Graduate Students. Prior to the policy, a woman who became pregnant as a graduate student would lose her financial support and her health insurance at a time when she needed it most. Also, international students would lose their visa status. Many in the faculty senate were just not aware of the problems that graduate students were facing. Dr. Fuentes did the necessary research, educated the faculty senate, and worked through the Academic Policy Committee and the full Faculty Senate enabling policy change last May. The new policy allows graduate women to maintain their financial support, health insurance, and full-time student status during parental leave.
In addition to these major policy efforts, Dr. Fuentes, a Senior Scholar in the ADVANCE NC STATE program, often speaks to groups about women’s empowerment. For example, she was recently a featured speaker at the Advancing Strategic Partnerships: Women and Minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Conference as well as the North Carolina Symposium for Women in Mathematics and Statistics. Dr. Fuentes has been very supportive and encouraging to female students, faculty and staff. She was instrumental in the establishment of the NC State Women in Statistics Networking Group, which primarily provides support to female graduate students , She is strong advocate for female faculty pursuing administrative positions and leadership roles in professional societies and is very supportive of her staff’s career advancement into leadership positions. These examples of selfless caring for individuals as well as her policy reforms are why Dr. Fuentes is highly deserving of the Faculty Category of 2013 Equity for Women Award.
Dr. Marie Davidian – Not Your Average Statistician
Statistician Dr. Marie Davidian, in SAS Hall, is working to build public understanding of statistics. It’s no mean feat.
For as long as Marie Davidian can remember, statistics has been a dreaded field. When she tells people she’s a statistician, she doesn’t usually get warm responses. The statistics professor thinks the aversion stems from how poorly the discipline was once taught.
“Traditionally it wasn’t taught as a subject that was really useful,” she says.
But thanks to a major data explosion, statistics is getting a lot of attention in the scientific and popular media. In the past year the Boston Globe, American Journal of Science and Nature have devoted entire editions to data and described the field as “hot.” A watershed event occurred in 2009 when Google chief economist Hal Varian described statisticians as this decade’s “sexy professional.” And dead-on predictions of the 2012 and 2008 presidential elections by statistician Nate Silver were hailed as genius.
“So now we are sexy—it’s great— and this helps raise awareness of how important statistics is,” Davidian says.
2013 ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Winners
Graduate students Xiaofei Bai and Laura Boehm are selected winners of the 2013 Distinguished paper award competition.
Dr .Alison Motsinger – 2012 Faculty Scholar
Alison Motsinger has being selected a 2012 NCSU Faculty Scholar. She is among the first group of emerging academic leaders recognized by this very competitive NCSU award. This recognition is a testimony of the impact her outstanding research is having on the NCSU community and worldwide.
Gina Pomann – Outstanding Student Award 2012
Gina-Maria Pomann, an NSF and AT&T Graduate Research Fellow was awarded the University wide 2012 ‘Outstanding Student Award’ for her efforts to promote diversity and academic excellence on campus. As part of this work, she was awarded a grant by the graduate school to hold events focused on educating students about how to reach their academic goals.
The events will be run by two organizations on campus which she presides over, We Connect Now (WCN)-NCSU and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in the Sciences (SACNAS)-NCSU. WCN-NCSU is an organization focused on raising awareness about and promoting the advancement of students with disabilities. SACNAS-NCSU is an organization focused on promoting the advancement of students with diverse backgrounds and particularly focuses on helping students pursue higher levels of education while achieving academic excellence.
For the 2012-2013 academic year, all students are invited to attend five events sponsored by the Graduate School: (1) a seminar about skills and tactics for taking the GRE; (2) a seminar given by Dr. David Shafer of the Graduate School about different types of funding for graduate study; (3) an event called ‘Speed Networking’ with an emphasis on teaching students the skills and the power of networking; (4) a graduate student panel about funding sources for graduate study; and (5) a mentoring lunch mixer with faculty.
Information about these organizations, their initiatives, and events can be found on their websites and Facebook pages. Volunteers are always needed to help plan and implement these events. Please feel free to contact either of the organizations if you would like to get involved!
SACNAS-NCSU
Website: http://ncsu.orgsync.com/org/sacnas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SACNAS.NCSU
Email: sacnas.ncsu@gmail.com
WCN-NCSU
Website: http://ncsu.orgsync.com/org/weconnectnowncstate/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WCN.NCSU
Email: weconnectnow.ncsu@gmail.com
Kristin Linn wins Clint Miller Best Poster Award at 2012 SRCOS
Kristin Linn won the Clint Miller Best Poster Award at the 2012 SRCOS Summer Research Conference in Jekyll Island, GA. The title of her poster was “A Bayesian Analysis of a Thorough QT Study” and was joint work with Dr. Sujit Ghosh. The QT interval is a portion of the heart’s electrical cycle that must be monitored during clinical trials because prolongation of the interval may lead to arrhythmias or cardiac arrest. The work focused on modeling the mean of patient longitudinal QT interval trajectories non-parametrically, and a MCMC sampling scheme was developed to obtain posterior samples of the mean function.
Chen-Yen Lin wins Student Paper Competition at JSM
Chen-Yen Lin won a student paper competition at the JSM nonparametric
session. The title of the awarded paper is “Variable Selection for
Nonparametric Quantile Regression via Smoothing Spline-ANOVA”. This
paper is a joint work with his advisors, Dr. Hao Helen Zhang and Dr.
Howard D. Bondell, and also Dr. Hui Zou from University of Minnesota.
Daowen Zhang – ASA Fellow (2012)
The American Statistical Association (ASA), which is the largest community of statisticians, every year selects a very limited number of statisticians from academia, government, and industry as ASA Fellows. This is one of the most prestigious recognitions for a statistician, and it is also extremely competitive. This year, a full professor in our Department, Daowen Zhang, has been selected an ASA Fellow, for his excellence in his research and service to our profession.
Huxia “Judy” Wang Wins NSF Career Award
Huixia “Judy” Wang, assistant professor of statistics at NC State University, has received an Early Career Development Award, more commonly known as a CAREER Award, from the National Science Foundation.
The award is one of the highest honors given by NSF to early-career university faculty in science and engineering, and is intended to advance the development of their research and careers. This is the 18th CAREER Award received by a PAMS faculty member – and the fourth received by a member of the statistics faculty – since 2004.
Wang’s five-year, $400,000 grant will fund research related to her proposal, titled “A new and pragmatic framework for modeling and predicting conditional quantiles in data-sparse regions.” Through this work, Wang and her collaborators will seek to develop new theories and methodologies to better model and predict events that may be extremely rare, yet have significant consequences. Unexpectedly heavy rainfall, large portfolio loss, and dangerously low birth weight are just a few examples of the type of events that could be addressed.
A native of Henan Province, China, Wang earned her B.S. and M.S. in Statistics from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University before coming to the U.S. in 2002 to conduct her doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After earning her Ph.D. in 2006, Wang joined the faculty of the NC State University Department of Statistics, where her research has focused on bioinformatics, quantile regression, measurement error, missing data, longitudinal data analysis, survival data analysis, empirical likelihood and extremes.