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.