Congratulations to Professor Jingyi “Jessica” Li and her research group, the Junction of Statistics and Biology. They developed a new statistical method called AIDE. The method recovers full-length sequences of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules from data generated by second-generation RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology.

More details are available at this link:

https://www.physicalsciences.ucla.edu/development-of-new-statistical-method-likely-to-produce-insights-into-human-diseases/

Professor Rob Gould, along with Suyen Machado and Annamarie Francoise from UCLA’s Center X, were awarded a grant from the College Futures Foundation to support the continued development of the Mobilize Introduction to Data Science (IDS) high school course. IDS is the first course of its kind and is currently taught in 15 districts and 45 high schools. To date, over 9,500 students, the vast majority of whom come from communities underrepresented in STEM, have taken IDS and learned to analyze data using R. IDS was recently featured in the Freakonomics Podcast Episode 391 (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum). The College Futures Foundation is a non-profit organization that seeks to catalyze systemic change, increase college degree completion, and close equity gaps in education.

Congratulations to Rob and his team!

This traineeship focuses on training and mentoring graduate students in interdisciplinary research related to ModEling and uNdersTanding human behaviOR (MENTOR), at the intersection of data science, mathematics, cryptography, artificial intelligence, genomics, behavior science, and social science.

This prestigious award will cover tuition and provide a full stipend to Heather for 12 months. More details are available at this link.

We are happy to report that Jessica Li and Allie Fletcher 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!

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recruits high-potential, early-career scientists and engineers and supports their graduate research training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. GRFP provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period and cost-of-education allowance to the graduate institution.

Sydney, Gabriel and Stephanie are second year Ph.D. students. Sydney is working on falsification testing with Professor Erin Hartman, Gabriel is working on causal order estimation of Bayesian networks with Professors Zhou and Amini, while Stephanie Stacy is working on cognition related questions with Professor Tao Gao.

It is a great honor for the department as we received 3 of the 13 awards given nationwide in the discipline of Statistics.

More details about the fellowship are found at this link.

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.

Hongquan Xu has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). The IMS Fellowship honors the outstanding research and professional contributions of its members. The decision to grant this honor to an IMS member is based on the member’s demonstrated distinction in research in statistics or probability. Each Fellow nominee is assessed by a committee of their peers for the award. Only about one-half of one percent of the IMS membership receive this honor each year.

Judea Pearl has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). The decision to grant this honor to an ASA member is based on the member’s contribution to the field of statistics, the ASA and society at large. This is very rare as only about one-third of one percent of the ASA membership receive this honor each year.

Rob Gould has been awarded the 2019 Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award by the American Statistical Association (ASA). The Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award recognizes an individual for sustained excellence in teaching and statistics education (for a minimum of 20 years). This very prestigious award is given to at most one person per year by the ASA.

Congratulations to Hongquan, Judea and Rob!

The 2019 De Leeuw Seminar happened first. Roger Peng, Professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University (and a Ph.D. alumnus of ours) spoke on “The New Future of Data Analysis”. A recording of his talk is below:

Following that many of the faculty who were instrumental in the formation of our department spoke of the many steps and challenges that were overcome in order for it to form. Audience members (alumni, current students and staff) shared what the department has meant to them as well. Gifts and appreciation were conferred to retiring Student Affairs Officer Glenda Jones. This most-loved department member served us for over a decade and will be missed by all. Best wishes were given to her as she enters this new stage of her life. A recording of this portion of the evening is below:

The event ended with a cocktail reception in the lobby of CNSI where the departmental community and alumni mixed. Many people reconnected with friends and colleagues from past years.

We are pleased to announce the spring speaker for the Distinguished Women in Statistics Lecture Series: Dr. Jennie E. Brand, Professor of Sociology and Statistics at UCLA. She will present on May 6th at 4:30 pm in the Sierra Room of the Faculty Center, dinner will be held around 6 pm.

Click this link for more details and to RSVP for the talk and post-seminar dinner by April 26th.

The 2019 De Leeuw Seminar will be happening from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. The details concerning it are available on our Seminars webpage. Please RSVP here for this seminar. A flyer for the seminar is available here. It will be followed by a reception in the CNSI lobby. From 6:00pm – 7:30pm we will have our 20th Anniversary Celebration. All department members have been invited as well as our alumni. At this event we will hear from some community members, including Jan himself. All will have an opportunity to talk about the department. The day ends with a cocktail reception in the lobby of CNSI where the the departmental community and alumni can mix. Please click here to RSVP for the 20th Anniversary Celebration.