We are happy to report that Allie Fletcher and Jessica Li have both been promoted to Associate Professor. Both promotions are effective July 1, 2019 and come with tenure.

Allie Fletcher’s work is interdisciplinary between applied mathematics, statistics, computer sciences, and electrical engineering. She brings a theoretician perspective to signal processing and high-dimensional inference, especially in sparse recovery and computational neuroscience. She has joint appointments in Mathematics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, as well as the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at University of California, Berkeley.

Jessica Li’s work is on the interface between statistics and biology, especially computational biology. She has joint appointments in Statistics, Biomathematics, and Human Genetics, as well as her role in the new Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program in Bioinformatics.

Both Allie and Jessica are exceptional scientists and show how statisticians are advancing science across the university. They bring statistical ideas to other fields and bring back to our discipline novel ideas that enrich us.

Please join us in congratulating Allie and Jessica!

Please congratulate our very own Allie Fletcher. She has just been named a 2019–2020 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Fletcher joins more than 50 women and men in the incoming fellowship class as they pursue work across the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts. The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program has rapidly become one of the most competitive programs of its kind in the world, with an acceptance rate of only 4 percent each year.

More details about this fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute are available at this link. There is a UCLA Newsroom article about this story at this link with more details as well.

Parthe Pandit and Mojtaba Sahraee, both Ph.D. students from Professor Allie Fletcher’s research group, received a Jack Keil Wolf Student Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT).  The IEEE ISIT is the premier conference in information theory, and the paper from Professor Fletcher’s group was selected from over 630 accepted manuscripts. More details about this award are found at this link.

The paper, “Asymptotics of MAP Inference in Deep Networks,” provides a powerful new tool for understanding reconstruction in systems with deep generative networks as priors. Such deep generative models have had enormous practical success in problems with complex data. Congratulations to Parthe and Mojtaba!

Congratulations to Professor Song-Chun Zhu and many members of his research group, VCLA, who helped to host and organize CVPR 2019 from June 16 to June 20, 2019 in Long Beach. CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) 2019 is the premier annual computer vision event. There were 9,000+ registered attendees from 68 countries and 180+ companies as exhibitors.

Details about this conference are available at link 1 and link 2.