Dear Friends of UW Statistics,
As we approach the end of another remarkable year, I am filled with gratitude and pride for the many milestones our department has achieved. This season offers a moment to reflect on our journey, celebrate our community, and look forward to an inspiring future.
Summer@UW
Summer was an exciting time for our department. Our 2024 JSM Statistics/Biostatistics Alumni Reception was held on August 5 at Spirit of 77, located at 500 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd in Portland. About 100 students, alumni, faculty members and friends of both departments attended the event. I was very happy to see many friends, both old and new, and share some departmental updates with everyone. Then, on August 9th, our department co-hosted a conference to celebrate the career of Adrian Raftery, Professor of Statistics and Sociology, and founding Director of CSSS. The day-long event was held in the Walker-Ames room of Kane Hall and featured scientific presentations by Adrian's former students, collaborators, and colleagues. The celebration continued in the HUB's Lyceum room with a lovely cocktail reception and dinner. Adrian's guests shared heartfelt memories, commemorated his achievements, and honored his enduring impact on our community. Finally, the joint Statistics/Biostatistics Autumn dinner was held at UW Center for Urban Horticulture on Friday October 4, with about 80 people attending the event.
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Blackwell Seminar
This year’s Blackwell Seminar was held on Friday October 18, and featured Cynthia Rudin, the Gilbert, Louis and Edward Lehrman Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. The title of her talk was "Simpler Machine Learning Models for a Complicated World." A recording of her unique talk is available here.
Honors and awards
Our faculty and students received various awards over the last few months. In July, Adrian Raftery was elected Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). In August, Adrian Dobra was selected as the winner of the 2024 NISS Distinguished Alumni Award and Carlos Cinelli received an award from the Natural Science Foundation for his work on sensitivity analysis tools for quasi-experimental designs. In November, Ph.D. students Medha Agarwal and Ronak Mehta received student poster awards at the 2024 Statistical Learning and Data Science Conference. And in December, Yikun Zhang was selected as the recipient of the 2023-2024 Dorothy M. Gilford Teaching Award, and Alex Luedtke was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Faculty Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award.
New faculty
As I mentioned in our Summer newsletter, three faculty members have joined our department: Ali Shojaie, Professor of Biostatistics, became a jointly-appointed faculty with Statistics, Anne Wagner, a graduate of our Ph.D. program and former part-time lecturer has joined as an Assistant Teaching Professor, and Zoraida Fernandez-Rico, a graduate of the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro and former postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University will be joining us in January as an Acting Assistant Professor. Additionally, Xinwei Shen, currently a postdoctoral scholar at ETH Zürich, will be joining us as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in September 2025.
Thank you for being an integral part of the Stat@UW story. We look forward to sharing more milestones with you in 2025 and beyond.
Warmest wishes,
Abel Rodriguez