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.

 

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.

Armed with two new grants, totaling more than $6 million, Montserrat “Montse” Fuentes is ensuring that NC State continues to be a leader in the quantitative study of climate change and environmental health.

The first project is funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. It aims to predict how a changing climate may impact the effect of airborne pollutants on human health.

Fuentes, who recently was appointed head of NC State’s Department of Statistics, will lead the three-year project, which includes research partners from Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.

“What we are interested in discovering is how weather variables affect air pollution, specifically the small particulate matter in our air that has the largest impact on human health,” Fuentes says. “And further, how that health impact varies in differently populated environments, such as cities versus rural areas.”

The collaborators will be tasked with creating statistical models that factor in different mixtures of pollutants, weather patterns, and health outcomes within various neighborhoods, and developing frameworks that will characterize the impact of climate change on these factors and on human health. “The relationship between weather patterns and pollution is important, particularly when it comes to protecting the health of our most vulnerable citizens,” Fuentes adds. “We hope that the predictive capabilities of these models will help us do just that.”

Training the atmospheric scientists of tomorrow

The second project will create a national network of statisticians with interdisciplinary expertise in atmospheric and oceanic science, in order to better quantify and interpret climactic and environmental data. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the five-year, $5 million project will provide interdisciplinary training for mathematicians and statisticians who are interested in atmospheric and oceanic science. Students will have the opportunity to receive specialized training at one of 12 participating institutions across the U.S.

The three lead institutions, or hubs, of the project are NC State, the University of Chicago and the University of Washington. The other nine participants, or nodes, are: Duke University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Climatic Data Center, Ohio State University, Purdue University, San Diego State University, UNC-Wilmington, the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and the Statistical and Mathematical Sciences Institute.

“Students will be able to train at NC State or at any one of the other nodes,” says Fuentes. “While there, they can work on research with a local mentor, but no matter where they train they will all end up with the same interdisciplinary expertise at the end.”

The topics covered by the students will include spatio-temporal modeling, which are statistical models that allow scientists to include all of the variables necessary to describe a changing world and to accurately assess climate projections.

“Statisticians specialize in quantifying uncertainty,” says Fuentes, “and as the complexity of the models we are being asked to create increases, it is becoming necessary for statisticians to have some background in those scientific fields. Interdisciplinary training is the future of statistics.”

Please join us to congratulate one of our faculty members, Butch Tsiatis, for his excellence in teaching, as recognized by the American Statistical Society. He has been awarded the very prestigious Excellence Education Award from the ASA for his shortcourse on “Semiparametric Theory and Missing Data,” at the JSM 2011 in Miami.

The selection of the ASA Excellence Education Award is based on a number of criteria including feedback from the course evaluation forms and course attendance. The feedback received from Dr. Tsiatis’s teaching, was
outstanding.

Congratulations Butch!

Dr. Marie Davidian, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University, has been elected president of the American Statistical Association (ASA). Her term of service will begin Jan. 1, 2013. The ASA is a scientific and educational society founded in 1839, with members serving in academia, government and industry in more than 90 countries.

Davidian’s research focuses on developing statistical models and methods for analysis of clinical trials and observational studies, for studying the movement, effect and breakdown of drugs in the human body, and for characterizing disease progression in the design of treatment strategies.