1. Home
  2. News & Resources
  3. News Archive

News Archive

Recent announcements and events in the Department of Statistics can be found below.

2017:

  • Sham Kakade and Maryam Fazel earn NSF TRIPODS Award to advance the state of the art in data science. More information
  • Three alumni of our department were named as IMS Fellows at the 2017 JSM in Baltimore: Moulinath Banerjee (University of Michigan), Florentina Bunea (Cornell University), Marloes Maathuis (ETH Zurich).
  • Andy Siegel (Adjunct Professor of Statistics) is mentioned in this morning's Wall Street Journal (page A2) in "The Numbers" column by Jo Craven McGinty. Article Here
  • Warming of the planet by 2 degrees Celsius is often seen as a “tipping point” that people should try to avoid by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. But the Earth is very likely to exceed that change, according to new University of Washington research. More information
  • Fang Han has been awarded a three-year NSF DMS grant, entitled "An Integrated Toolkit for High-Dimensional Complex and Time Series Data Analysis".
  • Zaid Harchaoui has been awarded a Criteo Faculty Research Award for his research project on robust statistical machine learning with change detection and adaptation. More information
  • The Seattle branch of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) has awarded Emily Fox, their 2017 Award for Scientific Advancement in STEM. Emily will be recognized at the AWIS Banquet on Tuesday June 6. More Information
  • Zaid Harchaoui and Sham Kakade announce new publicly available dataset containing 330 classical music recordings with fine-grained annotations for learning statistical models of music.

 

2016:

 

2015:

  • An updated program solicitation for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is now available. More details can be found here
  • In conjunction with JSM, UW Statistics and Biostatistics are organizing two events for all our alumni and friends. The first is on August 9th 3-6pm at the Waterfront Activities Center on the UW campus, mingling and meeting old and new friends. The Stat/Biostat JSM reception is on August 10, 5-7pm at the Grand Hyatt in the Leonesa Ballroom III.
  • Tyler McCormick receives an NIH Career Development Award for work on estimating vital rates in developing countries.
  • Emily Fox is the recipient of a 2015 ONR Young Investigator Award which promotes the professional development of early-career academic scientists both as researchers and instructors. The award includes funding support for expenses critical to ongoing and planned investigational studies.
  • Congratulations to Amanda Koepke for winning the Young Investigator Award, Jason Xu for winning the Biometrics section student travel award, and Maryclare Griffin for winning the 2015 Student Paper from the GS/SS/SMR sections. The awards were given by the American Statistical Association.
  • Congratulations to Hannah Director for being awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for Statistics. Hannah is a UW Statistics and Mathematics alumna, and will be starting her PhD in Statistics at the University of Washington next year.
  • Congratulations to Amanda Koepke for winning the Young Investigator Award, Jason Xu for winning the Biometrics section student travel award, and Maryclare Griffin for winning the 2015 Student Paper from the GS/SS/SMR sections. The awards were given by the American Statistical Association.
  • Emily Fox, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning, has been selected as a 2015 Sloan Fellow for research in computer science. The Sloan Fellowship is a prestigious award for young sciencetists in the fields of science, economics, mathematics, and computer science.
  • Congratulations to Hannah Director, former undergraduate and future PhD student, for being awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for Statistics. The NSF recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based Master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. Details can be found here
  • Congratulations to Amanda Koepke for winning the A Young Investigator Award from the ASA Section on Statistics in Epidemiology for her paper Predictive Modeling of cholera outbreak in Bangladesh," co-authored with UW stat faculty Vladimir Minin and Job Wakefield, and Betz Halloran from UW Biostat and Fred Hutch
  • Congratulations to Jason Xu for winning the Biometric section student travel award for his paper "Likelihood-Based Inference for Discretely Observed Birth-Death-Shift Processes, with Applications to Evolution of Mobile Genetic Elements." Jason will receive a $1000 award to present his paper in two Biometrics Session-sponsored topic-contributed sessions at JSM.
  • Congratulations to Maryclare Griffin whose paper, "Assessing Feasibility of Respondent Driven Sampling Using Pilot Data with an Application to Older Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adults". has been selected as a winner of the 2015 Student Paper Award from the Government Statistics/Social Statistics/Survey Methods Research sections of the American Statistical Association. Maryclare will present her paper at the 2015 JSM meetings in Seattle.
  • Emily Fox, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning, has been selected as a 2015 Sloan Fellow for research in computer science.The Sloan Fellowship is a prestigious award for young scientists in the fields of science, economics, mathematics, and computer science. An article about the 2015, UW Sloan research fellows can be found here.
  • Elena Erosheva and Carole Lee, a collaborator from the Department of Philosophy, have recently been announced as the winners of the first prize for the most creative idea submitted to the NIH's center for the scientific review contest to detect bias in peer review. Further details can be found here

 

2014:

 

2013:

  • Joe Felsenstein, Adjunct Professor, has been awarded the Japan International Prize for Biology for 2013 for his major contributions to the progress of evolutionary phylogeny, and helping to greatly advance evolutionary biology as a whole.
  • Hongzhe Li, Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics for his contributions to statistics in genomics and its applications to cancer, autoimmune diseases, and microbiology.
  • Peter Guttorp has been invited to serve as Chalmers Jubilee Professor for three months during 2014. This professorship at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) is offered to outstanding scientists in various fields.
  • Chair Elizabeth Thompson has been elected to an Honorary Fellowship by Newnham College, Cambridge, UK. An honorary college fellowship recognizes distinguished achievement, usually of persons having a former connection with the college.
  • Professor Adrian Raftery has been elected to the Royal Irish Academy (similar to the the National Academy of Sciences), and he has been awarded the Parzen Prize for statistical innovation.
  • Alumna Rebecca Nugent has just won the 2012-2013 Elliott Dunlap Smith Award for Distinguished Teaching and Educational Service in the Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University.
  • The Summer Institute for Statistical Methods in Infectious Diseases takes place July 8-24, 2013. A series of two-and-a-half day workshops are designed to introduce infectious disease researchers to modern methods of statistical analysis and mathematical modeling posed by modern infectious disease data.
  • The Summer Institute in Statistical Genetics takes place July 8-26, 2013. A series of two-and-a-half day workshops are designed to introduce geneticists to modern methods of statistical analysis and to introduce statisticians to the statistical challenges posed by modern genetic data.
  • Network Modeling for Epidemics (NME) is a 2013 short course offered at the UW that provides an introduction to stochastic network models for epidemiology, with a focus on empirically-based modeling of the transmission network for HIV. Applications for fellowship support are due March 1st.
  • UW's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology is pleased to announce the availability of funded traineeships (“Fellowships”) for students with experience and strong interests in demographic research, for the academic year 2013-2014. Completed applications must be received by the department coordinator by 5pm on February 27th.

 

2012:

 

2011:

  • Doug Martin has won the 2011 R1.edu award for innovative uses of online learning. R1.edu represents a consortium of 34 major US universities that offer online learning programs.
  • Peter Craigmile, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2000, supervised jointly by Donald Percival and Peter Guttorp, has been awarded the 2011 El-Shaarawi award for outstanding young environmetrician by the International Environmetrics Society.
  • Nilanjan Chatterjee, who earned his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Washington in 1999, supervised jointly by Norman Breslow and Jon Wellner, was awarded both the COPSS Presidents' Award and the George W. Snedecor Award.
  • In the Summer of 2012 Mathias Drton will take the position of Professor of Statistics. Mathias did his PhD in the department before doing a postdoc at Berkeley and then joining the faculty in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago.
  • In the Spring of 2012, Hari Narayanan arrives as an Assistant Professor, with a joint position between Statistics and Mathematics. Hari completed a PhD in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago in 2009, then moved to a postdoc at MIT and is about to start a postdoc at Princeton.
  • The Department of Statistics welcomes Tyler McCormick as Assistant Professor with a joint appointment between Statistics and Sociology. Tyler received his PhD from the Department of Statistics at the University of Columbia.
  • Jon Wellner won the Gottfried E. Noether Award for Nonparametric Statistics
  • Adrian Raftery won the ASA Award for Outstanding Statistical Application as well as the Statistics in Chemistry award, with departmental alumna Nema Dean
  • Fred Bookstein has been selected as the first recipient of the Rohlf Medal in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to the development and application of morphometric methods
  • Peter Guttorp has been nominated to present an IMS Medallion Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings/IMS Annual meeting in Montreal, Canada in August, 2013
  • Peter Guttorp wrote "I was going to become a science journalist " for the Newsletter of the Section on Statistics and the Environment, American Statistical Association, Vol.13, No.1, 2011.
  • UN cites research: A new method for projecting fertility rates developed in a paper whose authors include UW alumna Leontine Alkema and UW faculty Adrian Raftery and Samuel Clark was used by the United Nations as the basis for their new population projections for all countries. The project was described by UW Today.
  • Seattle DOT cites research on Seattle Viaduct: A recent paper by Hana Ševčíková, Adrian Raftery and Paul Waddell on the effect of the Seattle Viaduct project on commute times was cited by the Seattle Department of Transportation and by UW news.
  • Peter Guttorp has been nominated to present an IMS Medallion Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings/IMS Annual meeting in Montreal, Canada in August, 2013
  • U.S. Supreme Court brief cites work: A U.S. Supreme Court brief submitted by Costco in the current WalMart class action case cites an article on Simpson's Paradox by UW Stat PhD Marios Pavlides and professor Michael Perlman
  • Visitation Day 2011: Prospective Students visited our department.

 

2010:

  • NRC Rankings - In the recently released National Research Council's rankings, the University of Washington's Department of Statistics program had a 90% interval ranking of 2nd to 4th (out of 61) in the survey-based (S) ranking which weights characteristics of a program that are deemed important by faculty in statistics. The 90% interval on the department's research was 3rd to 6th, (again out of 61)."
  • Julian Besag, Professor of Statistics at the UW from 1989-2007 and Professor Emeritus from 2007, passed away on August 6th in Bristol.
  • Congratulations to Jon Wellner who was honored with Knighthood by the Dutch Consul at the conference that was recently held at the UW in his honor.
  • Le Bao has received the highly prestigious Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad. Le was ranked second among Chinese graduate students across all fields and all universities in the Western United States.
  • The University of Washington's Statistics Department has been ranked third in the nation amongst Statistics Departments for 2010
  • Jon Wakefield has been appointed chair of the Statistics Department through August 31st, 2011
  • Congratulations to June Morita who is an ASA Founders Award recipient.
  • A U.S. Supreme Court brief cites Bookstein, Sampson, Streissguth regarding the application of morphometrics to the study of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

 

2009:

  • Congratulations to Adrian Raftery was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This is one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive and recognizes those who have made distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
  • Congratulations to June Morita who was awarded an ASA Founders Award.
  • Congratulations to Mark S. Handcock who was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
  • Congratulations to Peter Guttorp who received an honorary doctorate in Engineering from Lund University, Sweden.
  • Congratulations to Krista J. Gile who has won the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA)'s Best Student Paper Award for 2009.
  • Congratulations to Gail Potter who was awarded a Thomas Francis, Jr. Global Health Fellowship. She used it to under take research in Senegal during the summer 2009.
  • Congratulations to Chris Volinsky, Alumni 1997, UW Statistics, a member of Bellkor and Scientist at AT&T Research was part of a seven-man team to win $1 million dollar Netflix prize.
  • Congratulations to Nilanjan Chatterjee who has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Society.
  • Congratulations to Jeffrey Eaton received the highly competitive Marshall Scholarship which pays for postgraduate students to attend the University of their choice within the United Kingdom.
  • Congratulations to Nate Derby who has been chosen to be the Academic Chair for the 2009 Pacific Northwest SAS Users Group

 

2008:

  • Congratulations to Qunhua Li for winning the 2008 WNAR Best Student Paper Competition for her paper entitled "A Nested Mixture Model for Protein Identification using Mass Spectrometry".
  • Chris Volinsky (1997 Graduate) was featured in a New York Times article about his work on the Netflix prize.
  • VIGRE Fellows Summary for 2007-2008.
  • A list of all graduates from 2004 to present.
  • A list of recent faculty and student awards and recent graduates.
  • Congratulations to Vladimir Minin who has won the 2007 Leonard J. Savage Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Applied Bayesian Methodology
  • Congratulations to Elizabeth Thompson for being elected into the National Academ of Sciences. story

 

2007:

  • Congratulations to alumnus Chris Volinski, a member of the research team that won the Netflix progress prize! You can read a news blurb and links here, an overview of their methods here, and a related paper detailing their methods here.
  • Congratulations to Peter Guttorp and alumnus Jim Hughes, frequent contributors to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change! This panel, along with former Vice President Al Gore, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. You can read more about the award here, and see the list of contributors here.
  • Congratulations to Toby and Ruth White on the birth of their daughter, Aleah White!
  • Congratulations to Qunhua Li for winning the best poster competition at the 2007 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). The award is given to the best poster presentation by a WNAR member (http://www.wnar.org/). The award was for her poster entitled "Statistical methods for Peptide Identification Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry Through Sequence Database Searching." The poster is joint authored with Matthew Stephens and the abstract is available here.
  • Congratulations to Peter Guttorp for being awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics and the Environment. The award is in recognition of his innovative work on statistical methodology in environmental research, leadership in the development of environmetrics, and service to the profession.
  • Congratulations to Peter and Jenn Hoff on the birth of their son, Henry Hoff!
  • Congratulations to Adrian Raftery for being elected Fellow of the IMS!
  • Congratulations to Donatello Telesca and alumnus Anton Westveld for winning the student paper competition in the ASA Section of Bayesian Statistical Science!
  • Congratulations to Bryan and Addi Daisley on the birth of their daughter, Lyla Cynthia Daisley!

 

2006:

  • Congratulations to Paul Scheet, who is one of two recipients of the 2006 "Cotterman Award" for the best paper published by a student last year in the American Journal for Human Genetics.
  • Congratulations to alumnus Ross Taplin, who recently gave a Royal Statistical Society Read Paper on the use of consulting role plays in teaching statistics. The paper will be published with discussion and rejoinder in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A. Details of the paper and how to submit a discussion are at http://www.rss.org.uk/main.asp?page=1836. The deadline for submissions is September 26.
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive], [an error occurred while processing this directive], and alumnus Jeremy Tantrum, whose paper "Model-Based Clustering for Social Networks," will be read to the Royal Statistical Society at a Meeting of the Society in London on October 11. The paper will subsequently be published with discussion and rejoinder in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A. Scientists are welcome to submit short discussions (no more than 400 words plus one figure) for publication as part of the discussion of the paper. Such discussions should be submitted to RSS Executive Editor Dr. Martin Owen (email: M dot Owen at rss dot org dot uk) no later than October 20.
  • Kristin Sprague, our former Graduate Program Assistant, died on Aug. 19 of natural causes. You can read her obituary here.
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]who recently received the Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research from NISS at JSM 2006.
  • The Joint Statistical Meetings were held in Seattle August 6-10.

 

2005:

  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]for winning the first prize in the 2005 WNAR student paper competition (at the IMS-WNAR Western Regional meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska) , and to [an error occurred while processing this directive] for winning one of the two second prizes.
  • It has just been announced that [an error occurred while processing this directive]was the most cited mathematician in the world for the period 1995-2005, according to the Institute for Scientific Information. Congratulations to Adrian for a tremendous accomplishment!
  • Congratulations to Tilmann Gneiting who is the recipient of the inaugural Tweedie New Researcher Award. He will present the Tweedie New Researcher Invited Lecture at the 2005 New Researchers Conference in Minneapolis, MN, Aug 2-6, 2005.

 

2004:

  • Congratulations to Addi Daisley who will replace Kristin Sprague as the Graduate Program Assistant beginning on October 11th, 2004. And many thanks to Kristin for all that she's done for the department!
  • We celebrated the department's 25th anniversary on September 23/24 with a great symposium and a party. Check out the anniversary webpage (removed) for details.
  • Congratulations to our alumnus Michael Newton for winning the COPSS Presidents' Award 2004.
  • Congratulations to Mathias Drton for winning the best student paper award at the 20th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2004). The paper was co-authored by [an error occurred while processing this directive].
  • Congratulations to Raphael Gottardo for winning the first prize in the 2004 WNAR student paper competition (at the IMS-WNAR Western Regional meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico).
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]for being elected Council of Chapters Board Representative of the ASA.
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]for being elected Fellow of the Royal Society. "He is distinguished for his pioneering work on the statistical theory and analysis of spatial processes, especially conditional lattice systems. His work has been seminal in recent statistical developments ranging from image analysis to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods."
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive], who was the third most-cited mathematician for the decade 1993-2003 as reported by the Institute for Scientific Information.
  • The article "Model-based clustering and data transformations for gene expression data," by Ka Yee Yeung, [an error occurred while processing this directive], [an error occurred while processing this directive], [an error occurred while processing this directive] and Larry Ruzzo (Bioinformatics, 2001), was identified by Thomson-ISI, publishers of the Web of Science and the Science Citation Index, as one of the most cited papers in the research area of "Gene Expression Data". They will publish a commentary on the paper in January 2004 under the heading Fast Moving Fronts.
  • The Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers (CF) has appointed [an error occurred while processing this directive] as their Environmental Professor during 2004/05. This professorship is awarded to an internationally known researcher in order to stimulate and catalyze Swedish environmental research. It is funded from the CF Environmental Fund. He will be located in Lund in southern Sweden.
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive] for winning a student paper competition award of the ASA Statistical Computing/Statistical Graphics section. She will present the paper at the JSM 2004 in Toronto.
  • Congratulations to Saonli Basu who won the distinguished student paper award at the ENAR Spring Meeting.

 

2003:

 

2002:

  • Congratulations to Jeremy Tantrum for winning a KDD 2002 Student Research award.
  • Congratulations to Elizabeth Thompson for winning a Guggenheim Fellowship.
  • The UW Demography Center (CSDE) has won one of the Center Grants in Demography, awarded only to a small number of leading demography centers in the nation. Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive] and [an error occurred while processing this directive]!
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive] who won a NSF Early Career Award that supports exceptionally promising junior faculty committed to the integration of research and education.
  • The department's faculty retreat was carried out on Tuesday 22nd January 2002. Check out all the discussions that took place! Faculty retreat website.

2001:

  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]who recently received the first Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research from NISS at JSM 2001.
  • Congratulations to Samantha Bates who shared the prize for best student paper, and won the award for best risk analysis paper at the recent International Environmetric Society meeting.
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]for winning the Weldon Memorial Prize, awarded by the University of Oxford.
  • [an error occurred while processing this directive]has been elected President-Elect of the International Environmetric Society.
  • Congratulations to [an error occurred while processing this directive]for being elected ASA fellow.
  • Workshop: Statistical Genetics and Computational Molecular Biology (12/16-18).