The Department of Statistics is pleased to welcome Anne Wagner, Ali Shojaie, and Zoraida Fernandez-Rico in their new positions! 
 
Anne Wagner joined our department this summer as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Anne graduated from the UW Statistics department Ph.D. program in 2023. Prior to graduating, Anne was a Predoc Instructor and a Teaching Assistant for several of our undergrad courses. After graduation, Anne was a part-time Lecturer for the Statistics department last academic year.  Anne’s academic interests include educational accessibility, cross disciplinary statistics, statistical literacy for the non-mathematically inclined, and alternative testing methods. 

Ali Shojaie joined our department on September 16, 2024 as a joint (Statistics/Biostatistics) Professor. Ali has been a member of the UW Biostatistics department since 2010 and has worked collaboratively with several of our Statistics faculty as an Adjunct Professor in Statistics. Ali completed his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Michigan in 2010. His research interests include, high-dimensional data and statistical learning, longitudinal and correlated data, computational biology, statistical network analysis, and neuroimaging. 

Zoraida F. Rico will be joining our department on January 1, 2025 as an Acting Assistant Professor. Zoraida is a mathematician from Bolivia. She completed her Ph.D. studies at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) under the supervision of Roberto I. Oliveira. Zoraida is currently a postdoc at Columbia University in New York.  

Her research primarily focuses on Mathematical Statistics, particularly in the area of Robust Statistics. Zoraida’s interests include concentration inequalities, high-dimensional statistics, empirical process theory, and PAC-Bayesian methods.