The Department of Statistics Fall 2016 Newsletter the University of Connecticut

The Department of Statistics Fall 2016 Newsletter The University of Connecticut

Table of Contents

A Message from the Department Head 3 From the Director of the Graduate Program 5 From the Director of the Undergraduate Program 7 Selected Faculty Activities 8 From the Director of the Statistical Consulting Services 32 Faculty News and Awards 34 Statistical Department Annual Picnic and Graduate Student Awards 35 Colloquia 37 International Workshop in Applied Probability 2016 40 Upcoming Conferences 41 Alumni News 43 Student News 48 Recent Graduates 50 Alumni Reply Form 51 Faculty, Staff, and Adjunct Faculty 52

A Message from the

Department Head

Welcome to the nineteenth issue of our Department Newsletter. I am very grateful to Professor Joseph Glaz for serving as the Head of Statistics for the past five years. Under his leadership, the department has grown substantially and blossomed in all aspects. The number of graduate students and undergraduate students has increased considerably. Now, we have more than 130 graduate students enrolled in our graduate program and over 140 undergraduate students majoring in statistics. We successfully launched the professional MS program in Biostatistics in 2015. Many of our faculty members have been elected to Fellows of various societies/associations and served as major officers in major statistical societies/associations as well as Editors or Associate Editors in major probability and statistical journals. As the new Head, I will ensure the sustainment of success that the department has enjoyed.

I would like to welcome Victor Hugo Lachos Davila, who has joined the Department as a Visiting Professor, and Fangfang Wang and Panpan Zhang who have joined as Visiting Assistant Professors in the fall. I would also like to welcome James Booth of Cornell University, who is staying in Storrs this fall during his sabbatical.

I would like to congratulate our colleagues Professors Dipak K. Dey, Kun Chen, and Haim Bar on receiving research grants from Travelers and the National Science Foundation this fall. Also, congratulations to Professor Yuping Zhang on receiving the 2016 Pre-K Career Development Award from the Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (CICATS). I am happy to inform you that Professor Nalini Ravishanker has become the Editor-in-Chief of International Statistical Review, and Professor Dipak K. Dey has become the Editor-in-Chief of Sankhya. I would also like you to know that I was elected to Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in June 2016. Congratulations to all recipients of these prestigious awards and honors!

The recipient of the 2015 Department of Statistics Distinguished Alumnus Award is Professor Bradley P. Carlin (Ph.D. 1989), Mayo Professor of Public Health and Head of Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota. On November 11, 2015, Brad visited Storrs to receive the award and delivered his talk on Bayesian Adaptive Clinical Trial Methods for

Incorporating Auxiliary Data and Identifying Interesting Subgroups, with Applications to Orphan Diseases.

UConn Statistics Department Alumni and Friends Dinner was successfully held in the Lao Beijing restaurant in Chicago on Monday, August 1, 2016 during the 2016 JSM. About 50 guests attended the dinner. This event promises to be a unique opportunity for alumni to reunite with former classmates and friends, reconnect with faculty, and share their wisdom and experience with current students. The guests enjoyed a delicious 19-course Chinese dinner with plenty of vegetarian dishes and wines. I would like to thank our faculty member, Xiaojing Wang, and our alumnus, Wangang Xie of AbbVie, for organizing this event. I would also like to thank our staff members Megan Petsa and Tracy Burke and Matt Fraulino of the Alumni Relations, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, for their help and support. Without them, it would be impossible for us to have had such a successful event. I expect that we will host another Department Alumni and Friends Dinner during the 2017 JSM in Baltimore.

International and national visibility of the department also continues to grow with our faculty’s participation in and visits to conferences and other universities all over the world. We have also developed a strong interdisciplinary research program within UConn. I am glad to report that our graduate program was ranked 18th in the U.S. by a nationwide poll of graduate students in 2015. More recently, University of Connecticut has been identified as one of the great value colleges for Statistics, ranking #26 in 2016. The ranking was created based on master’s and doctoral degree opportunities, research opportunities, internship and scholarship opportunities, etc. The following link presents the full story: http://www.greatvaluecolleges.net/rankings/statistics/.

I am grateful for the support our department has been receiving from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the University as a whole. We have two full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor positions to begin in August 2017. These two new faculty positions will help us to further strengthen research, undergraduate and graduate programs, and will enhance our department’s national and international standing.

The UConn Health Center has continued to support our students both from joint research grants as well as from internship programs. We thank Professor Robert Aseltine, Interim Chair, Division of Behavioral Science and Community Health and Deputy Director, Center for Public Health and Health Policy, for sponsoring research collaborations with our faculty and graduate students. We also thank Professor James Grady, Director of Biostatistics, Connecticut Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, for providing financial support and research opportunities for our graduate students. In addition, we are enjoying close research collaboration with the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP). With the joint appointments of our faculty members in the Biostatistics and Methodology Core at InCHIP, we will strengthen our research collaborations with one of the most active research centers at the University. I am looking forward to continuing to work jointly with Professor Jeff Fisher, Director of InCHIP, and Professor Tania B. Huedo-Medina, Director of Biostatistics and Methodology Core at InCHIP, to develop joint research initiatives.

Our Statistical Consulting Services (SCS) is continuing with great success. Currently, SCS provides three types of full-consulting project services, walk-in services, and online services. SCS hosted its first workshop event on Wednesday, May 11th, 2016. The day consisted of a series of three introductory workshops that covered survey design, power analysis/sample size calculation, and repeated measures analysis. About 55 people attended this workshop. The list of SCS clients continues to grow. I would like to thank our graduate students who work at SCS for their great effort and hard work. We are grateful for the financial support we have received for SCS from the Office of Vice President for Research and the Dean’s Offices in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, and School of Pharmacy.

We are continuing to be active University affiliates of NISS and SAMSI. Our faculty, graduate and undergraduate students are actively participating in programs at NISS and SAMSI. The Pfizer Global Research & Development Student Fellowship Program has been extended through Summer 2017. Our department and the Global Research & Development of Pfizer Inc. signed a joint agreement of the continuation of this Fellowship program. We are grateful to Pfizer for their continual support and are looking forward to further collaborations. Our collaboration with the Center for Nursing Research (CNR) will also continue through Spring 2017. I would like to thank the School of Nursing for their continuous support to our graduate students.

I am proud of our department accomplishments and would like to thank our faculty, staff, alumni, graduate students and professional friends for their commitment and support to the department. I would also like to invite all of our alumni to send us your news and stop by Storrs for a visit.

Ming-Hui Chen ([email protected])

From the Director of the Graduate Program

The graduate programs of our department provide excellent learning and research experiences to prepare students for a successful career in statistics. We offer a broad spectrum of modern courses in statistics and probability, covering advanced theories and methodologies, statistical computing, data management, and consulting. In advanced seminar courses, students are exposed to exciting areas of current research. Through our Statistical Consulting

Services, students are engaged in research in many areas of science and technology, and provide support to the research community of the University of Connecticut. We have an extensive collaboration with faculty members in educational, medical, biological, health and environmental sciences, and our graduate students have the opportunity to be employed as research assistants on many of their funded research projects.

I am glad to announce that the first year of our new Professional M.S. program in Biostatistics was a great success. We have 37 students currently enrolled in the program. Established in Fall 2014, the Professional M.S. program in Biostatistics focuses on practical skills that are sought after in health related fields. Like our M.S. program in Statistics and Ph.D. program, this program provides exciting opportunities to students.

During the 2015-16 academic year, 50 new students were enrolled in our graduate programs, 7 of them with support in the form of teaching or research assistantship from the department or a variety of other sources. A total of 127 graduate students were enrolled, out of which 39 were supported. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Dean's Office of the College of Liberal Arts and Science (CLAS), Dean's Office of the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR), Office of the Vice President for Research, and Pfizer, Inc.

Our graduate programs are highly competitive and visible around the world. This year over 623 students all over the world applied for admission to the programs. I would like to thank the members of the graduate admission committee, Professors Pozdnyakov (Director of Graduate Admissions), Chen, Kuo, Ravishanker, Vitale, and Yan, for their hard work in reviewing the applications. Thanks are also due to our administrative staff, Megan Petsa and Tracy Burke, for their hard work throughout the application and admission processes. This Fall 2016 semester, we welcomed 49 new students, 14 in the M.S. program in Statistics, 17 in the Professional M.S. program in Biostatistics, and 18 in the Ph.D. program, with 11 of the new Ph.D. students supported by the department.

An updated graduate brochure, providing information about the department, our graduate programs and application forms along with instructions, is available on the department website: www.stat.uconn.edu. Zhiyi Chi ([email protected])

From the Director of

the Undergraduate

Program

The Undergraduate Program has seen yet another year of growth, as we now have over 140 students majoring in Statistics and Mathematics-Statistics, many of them honors scholars. In addition, many students belonging to other academic disciplines wish to incorporate statistics coursework into their plans of study. Thus, our course offerings remain in high demand with near-full enrollment. Since reviving the Statistical Computing course, STAT 3675, we have had a great response in enrollment, and we plan to continue offering the course annually. Our summer session offerings (STAT 2215 and STAT 3025) also continue to attract many undergraduate students. Our graduates continue to achieve success in their academic careers, many being accepted to some of the country’s leading graduate programs for statistics. We also continue to connect students with undergraduate research opportunities, internships, and other resources. Our participation in the UConn Early College Experience (ECE) Program, which allows interaction between UConn and high schools across the state, also continues. Creating even more resources for potential and current statistics majors, we have kept very busy, and we expect to achieve continued growth for the program in the coming years.

Please visit the department website at www.stat.uconn.edu for the undergraduate brochure, information about our undergraduate program, and information for prospective majors and minors.

We also wish to congratulate all of our recent graduates for obtaining their Bachelor’s degree, and we wish them much success in all of their future endeavors! Nalini Ravishanker ([email protected])

Photo with 1.5pt black Haim Bar outline

Assistant Professor

Selected Invited Talks

Haim Bar attended the JSM 2015 conference and chaired a session on "Methods in Machine Learning and Data Mining". He gave an invited talk at the Modern Modeling Methods conference (m3, 2016) on "Network analysis using a random walk in sparse graphs". He gave invited talks on "A scalable empirical Bayes approach to variable selection" at Notre Dame University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (joint UMass/UConn statistics colloquium), University of Maryland, and The Ohio State University.

Outreach

Haim Bar is a co-chair of the organizing committee of QPRC 2017, which will be held at UConn. He served as a panel member in grant selection for NASA, and as a panel member in grant review for the Donahue Foundation. Haim Bar organized a team of four undergraduate students to represent UConn at the first American Statistical Association DataFest event in Connecticut.

Selected Publications

Molinari, E., Bar, H., Pyke, A. M., Patrizio, P. (2016). Transcriptome analysis of human cumulus cells reveals hypoxia as the main determinant of follicular senescence. Molecular Human Reproduction, 22(8), 866-876.

U.S. Patents 9384677, 9076342 "Automated execution and evaluation of network-based training exercises."

Bar, H., Booth, J. G., & Wells, M. T. (2014). A bivariate model for simultaneous testing in bioinformatics data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 109(506), 537-547. DOI: 10.1080.01621459.2014.884502.

Alexander, E. L., Gardete, S., Bar, H., Wells, M. T., Tomasz, A. & Rhee, K. Y. (2014). Intermediate-type

vancomycin resistance (VISA) in genetically-distinct staphylococcusaureus isolates is linked to specific, reversible metabolic alterations. PLoS ONE 9(5): e97137. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097137

Kun Chen

Assistant Professor

Editorial Boards

Associate Editor of Sankhya, the Indian Journal of Statistics  Co-Editor of the 2015 ICSA Symposium Proceeding Book

Selected Invited Talks

Presented at the Department of Statistics at University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC in March 2016  Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University, Boston, MA in April 2016  Department of Statistics at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL in April 2016  Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University in May 2016  The 6th Modern Modeling Methods Conference, Storrs, CT in May 2016  Big Statistics & Data Science Joint Conference, Renmin University, Beijing, China in May 2016  Conference on Statistical Learning and Data Science, Chapel Hill, NC in June 2016  The 25th ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, Atlanta, GA in June 2016  ICSA Conference on Data Science, Yunnan, China in July 2016  Joint Statistical Meeting (Topic-Contributed session), Chicago, IL in August 2016

Grants

PI on a sub-award of the NIH grant entitled “An integrative statistics-guided image-based multi-scale lung model’’ for 2013-2018  Received funding from Simons Foundation Collaboration Grants for Mathematicians, for the project entitled “Structured low rank modeling for multivariate statistical learning” for 2015-2020  PI on a sub-award of “New England eConsult Network” sponsored by Community Health Center, Inc.,  PI on a sub-award for suicide prevention from U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration  Awarded a three-year grant from the Division of Mathematical Sciences, the National Science Foundation for his project entitled “Integrative multivariate analysis of multi-view data” for 2016-2019.

Outreach

Taught a short course at NESS on April 24, 2015 with Jun Yan on Modern Multivariate Statistical Learning: Methods and Applications.

Selected Publications

Chen, K. & Ma, Y. (2016). Analysis of double single index models. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics. In press.

Chen, K., Hoffman, E., Seetharaman, I., Jiao, F., Lin, C.L., & Chan, K.-S. (2016). Linking lung airway structure to pulmonary function via composite bridge regression. Annals of Applied Statistics. In press.

Luo, C., Liu, J., Dey, D., & Chen, K. (2016). Canonical variate regression. Biostatistics, 17(3), 468-483.

Mukherjee, A., Chen, K., Wang, N. & Zhu, J. (2015). On the degrees of freedom of reduced-rank estimators in multivariate regression. Biometrika, 102(2), 457-477.

Photo with 1.5pt black Ming-Hui Chen outline Department Head

Editorial Boards

Editor of Bayesian Analysis  Editor of Statistics and Its Interface  Associate Editor of Journal of the American Statistical Association  Associate Editor of Lifetime Data Analysis  Associate Editor of Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics  Co-Guest Editor of Statistics and Its Interface for a Special Issue on Statistical and Computational Theory and Methodology for Big Data  Guest Editorial Board of Technometrics for a Special Issue on Statistical Analysis of Big Data

Selected Invited Talks

“A Bayesian Cure Rate Frailty Model for Survival Data in the Presence of Semi-Competing and Competing Risks” in an invited session on “Emerging Issues in Clinical Trials with Time-to-Event Data in the Presence of Competing Risks” at the 2016 Spring Meeting of the International Biometric Society, Eastern North American Region (ENAR), Austin, TX, March 2016  “Bayesian Multivariate Skew Meta-Regression Models for Individual Patient Data", in an invited Session on “Applications of Bayesian Analysis in Clinical Trial” at the 2016 ICSA-China Statistics Conference, Qingdao, China, June 2016  “The Power Priors: Theory and Applications”, in an invited Session on ``Recent Advances and Challenges of Big Data Inference with Complex Structures” at the 4th IMS-APRM, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, June 2016  “Estimation and Models for Longitudinal and Survival Data with Treatment Switches” in a Biometrics Section Invited Session on “Joint Modeling of Survival Time with Another Outcome in Clinical Trials or Observation Studies” at JSM 2016, Chicago, IL, 2016  “Joint Modeling of Longitudinal and Survival Data” jointly with Fan Zhang of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Danbury, Connecticut, September 2015  “Estimation of Discrete Survival Function through the Modeling of Diagnostic Accuracy for Mismeasured Outcome Data” in Department of Biostatistics, School of PHHP, the State University of New York at Buffalo, NY, October 2015  “Bayesian Model Assessment in Joint Modeling of Longitudinal and Survival Data with Applications to Cancer Clinical Trials” in the Department of Biostatistics, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, March 2016  “Data Acquisition, Management, and Analysis in Scientific Research” (Invited Instructor)  Spring 2016 RCR Training Workshop, Research Compliance Services, Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Connecticut, April 2016  “Bayesian Model Assessment in Joint Modeling of Longitudinal and Survival Data with Applications to Cancer Clinical Trials” in the Department of Applied Statistics, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, July 2016.

Grants

Co-PI of an NIH R01 grant on “Bayesian Approaches to Model Selection for Survival Data” for 2016-2021  NIH P01 grant on “Statistical Methods for Cancer Clinical Trials” for 2015-2020  NIH R01 grant on “Metabolomics Tools for Biomedicine” for 2015-2019  Co-PI on an NSF grant on “Estimating the Bayesian Phylogenetic Information Content of Systematic Data” for 2014-2017  Co-PI on an American Cancer Society grant on “Activatable Nanoparticles for Radiotherapy of Metastatic Ovarian Cancer” for 2015-2019  Co-PI (PI: George Bollas) of the UConn Provost Academic Plan grant on “Bayesian Design of Tests for Fault Detection and Isolation in Complex Systems” for 2016-2019  Co-PI (PI: Xiuling Lu) of another UConn Provost Academic Plan grant on “Polymer-Based Nanocarrier Platform for Improving Efficacy and Safety of Potent Chemotherapeutic Agents” for 2015-2018  Co-PI of the CHIP Seed grant for Obesity Research on “A Firefighter Physical Test & Training Program for Cardiovascular Health” for 2014-2016  PI on the subcontract from UNC of Amgen grant on “Bayesian Methods for Meta-analysis”, 2014-2016  Merck & Co grant on “Bayesian Methods for Design and Analysis of Clinical Trials” for 2015-2017  Co-PI (PI: Xiaojing Wang) of Sanofi US Services Inc. grant on “Development of Statistical Methodology for Identifying Respondent Subgroups Using Biomarker Signature”, 2016-2017  PI of Keter Environmental Services, Inc. grant on “Conducting an in-depth Statistical Study of Existing Data and Formulating a Model-based Method of Determining ‘Fair Share’ Tenant Rate”  PI on the subcontract from UNC of Merck & Co grant on “Methods for Interim Analysis with Incomplete Adjudication of Events”, 2015-2016  PI of the Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. grant on “Analysis of Quality of Life data and Survival Data with Treatment Switch” for 2014-2015.

Outreach

Adjunct Faculty in the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University (2007-Present, http://jphcoph.georgiasouthern.edu/faculty/directory/adjunct)  Reviewer of the grant proposals of the Research Grant Council (RGC) of Hong Kong (2013 – 2016), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (December 2015), and the National Research Foundation of South Africa (June 2016)  Served on NSF DCL panel (August, 2015) and the Clinical and Integrative Cardiovascular Sciences (CICS) Study Section, NIH (February, 2016)  Co-Chair of the Scientific Program Committee, the 10th ICSA International Conference, Shanghai, China, December, 19-22, 2016  Co-Chair of the Local Organizing Committee, the LIDA Conference on Data Science, Precision Medicine and Risk Analysis with Lifetime Data, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, May 24-27, 2017  President Elect Appointee to serve on the Committee on Nominations, American Statistical Association for 2016-2017  Member of the International Advisory Committee for the discipline of statistics of Shanghai Jiaotong University, 2013-present.

Selected Publications

Zhang, D., Chen, M.-H., Ibrahim, J. G., Boye, M. E., & Shen, W. (2016). Bayesian model assessment in joint modeling of longitudinal and survival data with applications to cancer clinical trials. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. In press.

Joeng, H.-K., Chen, M.-H., & Kang, S. (2016). Proportional exponentiated link transformed hazards (ELTH) models for discrete time survival data with application. Lifetime Data Analysis, 22, 38-62.

Yao, H., Kim, S., Chen, M.-H., Ibrahim, J.G., Shah, A.K., & Lin, J. (2015). Bayesian inference for multivariate meta-regression with partially observed within-study sample covariance matrix. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 110(510), 528-544. de Castro, M., Chen, M.-H., & Zhang, Y. (2015). Bayesian path specific frailty models for multi-state survival data with applications. Biometrics, 71, 760-771.

Published Books

Chen, M.-H., Kuo, L., & Lewis, P.O. (2014). Bayesian Phylogenetics: Methods, Algorithms, and Applications. Chapman & Hall/CRC Mathematical and Computational Biology. ISBN: 978-1466500792.

Chen, M.-H., Dey, D.K., Müller, P., Sun, D., & Ye, K. (2010). Frontiers of Statistical Decision Making and Bayesian Analysis --- In Honor of James O. Berger. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-1-4419-6943-9.

Ibrahim, J.G., Chen, M.-H., & Sinha, D. (2001). Bayesian Survival Analysis. Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387- 95277-2.

Chen, M.-H., Shao, Q.-M., & Ibrahim, J.G. (2000). Monte Carlo Methods in Bayesian Computation. Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-98935-8.

Petruccelli, J.D., Nandram, B., & Chen, M.-H. (1999). Applied Statistics for Engineers. Text Book, Prentice- Hall, INC., ISBN 0-13-565953-1.

Zhiyi Chi

Professor, Associate Head,

Director of Graduate

Program

Editorial Boards

Associate Editor for Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry.

Selected Invited Talks

Zhiyi Chi gave an invited talk at the 2016 International Workshop on Applied Probability, Toronto, Canada.

Outreach

Member of the Scientific Program Committee and Session Organizer for the 8th International Workshop in Applied Probability – IWAP 2016, Toronto, Canada, June 20-23, 2016.

Selected Publications

Chi, Z. (2015). Strong renewal theorems with infinite mean beyond local large deviations. Ann. Appl. Probab. 25, 1513--1539.

Sinha, A., Chi, Z., & Chen, M.-H. (2015). Bayesian inference of hidden Gamma process Cox model for survival data with ties. Statist. Sinica. 25, 1613-1635. doi:10.5705/ss.2012.351.

Chi, Z. (2014). Nonnormal small jump approximation of infinitely divisible distributions. Adv. in Appl. Probab. 46, 963-984.

Chi, Z. (2012). On exact sampling of nonnegative infinitely divisible random variables. Adv. in Appl. Probab. 44, 842-873.

Dipak Dey

Distinguished

Professor

Editorial Boards

Editor-in-chief, Sankhya, series A and Series B, The Indian Journal of Statistics, published through Springer.

Grants

Co-PI with James Rusling, from Chemistry on a NIH SBIR grant entitled, “Protein Biosensor Arrays based on Nanomaterials”, 2011-2015  Received the training grant with Jeremy Teitelbaum from Cigna Health care to form an analytics center to support graduate students from Statistics, Mathematics and Psychology  Co- PI with Dian Burgess from School of Pharmacy on a grant from UConn Provost’s office for the Bio-CHIP center  Co-PI with Yuping Zhang for a Research Excellence Program through OVPR  Modeling and Analysis of Large Insurance Claim and Occurrence Data: A Partnership Between UConn and Travelers

Outreach

Member, Accreditation Implementation Committee of the American Statistical Association, 2010  Member of the University senate, Research Dean Council, Associate Director, Connecticut Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (CICATS), Executive committee of the Tech Park, Core Research Group of the Center for Health Communication and Marketing, and Advisory Committee of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering (CESE) and Institute for Collaboration on Health Intervention and Policy (In CHIP)  Key personnel of UConn Bio-CHIP  Fellow, Institute for Public Health Research  Member of the Hong Kong Research Grant Council.

Selected Invited Talks

Presented at the International Indian Statistical Association, Conference in Pune, India, December 2015 (plenary speaker)  The International Chinese Statistical Association, Fort Collins, CO, June 2015  The Brazilian Conference on Regression, Campinas, Brazil, in July 2015  Department of Statistics, Federal University of Amazonas, Manaus, July 2015  at the International Statistical Institute meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2015  Invited Panelist at the World Congress of the International Statistical Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in July 2015  Special Invited Lecture at the School of Public Health, Oregon Health

14 and Science University, Portland, OR, August 2015  Department of Statistics, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas, September 2015  Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Texas, Houston, Texas, September 2015  Ninth International Triennial Calcutta Symposium, December 2015  Kolkata, Cogitas Analytics, Mumbai, India, December 2015  Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, January 2016  SIAM conference on Uncertainty Quantification, at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane, Switzerland, April 2016  Bayes, Frequentist and Fiducial Workshop at DIMACS, Rutgers University, April 2016  Social Decision Analysis Laboratory, Virginia Tech at Arlington, VA, May 2016  International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 2016  and at the, International Society for Bayesian Analysis World Congress, Cagliary, Sardinia, Italy, June 2016.

Selected Publications

Li, D., Wang, X., Lin, L., & Dey, D. (2016). Flexible link functions in nonparametric binary regression with Gaussian process priors. Biometrics, 72, 707-719. DOI: 10.1111/biom.12462

Li, W., Zhang, C., Willig, M.R., & Dey, D. (2015). Bayesian Markov chain random field co-simulation for improving land cover classification accuracy. Mathematical Geosciences, 47(2), 123-148.

Abanto-Valle, C., Dey, D., & Jiang, X. (2015). Binary state space mixed models with flexible link functions: A case study on deep brain stimulation on attention reaction time. Statistics and Its Interface, 8(2), 187-194.

Pancras, J., Wang, X., & Dey, D. (2015). Investigating the impact of customer stochasticity on firm price discrimination strategies using a new Bayesian mixture scale heterogeneity model. Marketing Letters, 1-16.

Published Books

Dey, D.K. & Yan, J. (Eds.) (2016). Extreme value modeling and risk analysis: Methods and applications. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press.

Upadhyay, S.K., Singh, U., Dey, D.K., & Loganathan, A. (Eds.) (2015). Current trends in Bayesian methodology with applications. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 27. ISBN 13:978-1-4822-3511-1.

Photo with 1.5pt black Joseph Glaz outline

Professor

Editorial Boards

Editor-in-Chief of Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability  Associate Editor of Sequential Analysis  Contracted to edit, jointly with Professor Markos Koutras, University of Piraeus, Greece, a two- volume Handbook on Scan Statistics, to be published by Springer

Selected Invited Talks

Joseph Glaz presented an invited lecture at the 8th International Workshop in Applied Probability - IWAP 2016, Toronto, Canada, June 20-23, 2016.

Outreach

Member of the Board of International Workshops in Applied Probability (IWAP). IWAP 2016 was held on June 20-23, 2016 in Toronto, Canada.  Member of the Scientific Committee of the 4th Stochastic Modeling and Data Analysis International Conference – SMTDA 2016, Valletta, Malta, June 1-4, 2016  Member of Scientific Program Committee of the International Symposium on Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis, ASMDA 2017, London, UK  Member of the oversight committee for an undergraduate minor in bioinformatics  Affiliated faculty with Booth Engineering Center for Advanced Technology (BECATS)

Selected Publications

Zhao, B. & Glaz, J. (2016). Scan statistics for detecting a local change in variance for normal data with unknown variance. Statistics and Probability Letters, 110, 137-145.

Chen, J. & Glaz, J. (2016). Scan statistics for monitoring data modeled by a negative binomial distribution. Communications in Statistics-Theory and Methods Ser. A, 45(6), 1632-1642.

Chen, J., Glaz, J., & Sison, C. P. (2016). Monte Carlo tests for multinomial proportions. Communications in

Statistics-Theory and Methods Ser. A. 45(6), 1747-1777.

Zhao, B. & Glaz, J. (2016). Scan statistics for detecting a local change in variance for normal data with known variance. Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, 18, 563-573.

Published Books

Chiquet, J., Glaz, J., Limnios, N. & Moyal, P. (Eds.) (2008). Book of Abstracts. IWAP 2008, 4th International Workshop in Applied Probability, Universitè de Technologie de Compiègne, Compiègne, France.

Baeza-Yates, R., Glaz, J., Gzyl, J., Hüsler, J., & Palacios, J. L. (Eds.) (2005). Recent Advances in Applied Probability. New York, NY: Springer.

Glaz, J., Naus, J. & Wallenstein, S. (2001). Scan Statistics. New York, NY: Springer.

Glaz, J. & Balakrishnan, N. (Eds.) (1999). Recent Advances on Scan Statistics. Boston, MA: Birkhauser Publishers.

Ofer Harel

Professor

Editorial Boards

Associate Editor for Statistics in Medicine and Sankhya, the Indian Journal of Statistics, Series B  On the Editorial Board of The Open Medical Informatics Journal and AIDS and Behavior.

Selected Invited Talks

Presented invited talks at the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM), Chicago, IL, August 2016  Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, Natanya, Israel, July, 2016  The Gertner Institute, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel, July, 2016  Statistics seminar Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel, July, 2016  Google Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, June, 2016  The 143rd APHA Annual Meeting & Exposition, Chicago, IL, November, 2015; The Methodology Center, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, September, 2015  The Center for Systems Genomics in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The

Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, September, 2015  Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM), Seattle, WA, August 2015)

Grants

Sub-contract PI on “Enhancing the Capacity of School Nurses to Reduce Excessive Anxiety in Children” supported by Department of Education (IES)  Co-PI on “Single Cell Lineage Map (SCLM)” supported by the University of Connecticut  Also has several sub-contracts from UCH to fund a number of graduate students

Outreach

Elected governing councilor for the Applied Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA)  Elected member of the Council of Sections, Health Policy Statistics Section, the American Statistical Association  Member, Special Emphasis Panel - Musculoskeletal Alterations, NASA HERO Musculoskeletal Panel  Member, Special Emphasis Panel - Artificial Gravity Bed Rest - AGBRESA Sensorimotor, NASA/ESA  Ad hoc reviewer, Biostatistical Methods and Research Design (BMRD) Study Section, Center For Scientific Review, National Institute of Health  Member, Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) for NIDA grant “Behavioral intervention to enhance HIV test/treat.”

Selected Publications

Chaurasia, A. & Harel, O. (2015). Partial F-tests with multiply imputed data in the linear regression framework via coefficient of determination. Statistics in Medicine, 34(3), 432–443.

Siddique, J., Harel, O., Crespi, C.M., & Hedeker, D. (2014). Binary variable multiple-model multiple imputation to address missing data mechanism uncertainty: Application to a smoking cessation trial. Statistics in Medicine, 33, 3013–3028.

Harel, O., Chung, H., & Miglioretti, D. (2013). Latent class regression: inference and estimation with two- stage multiple imputation. Biometrical Journal, 55(4), 541–553.

Siddique, J., Harel, O., & Crespi, C.M. (2012). Addressing missing data mechanism uncertainty using multiple-model multiple imputation: application to a longitudinal clinical trial. Annals of Applied Statistics, 6(4), 1814-1837.

Published Books

Harel, O. (2009). Strategies for data analysis with two types of missing values: From theory to application. Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing.

Lynn Kuo

Professor

Editorial Boards

Lynn Kuo is an Editor for Advances in Statistics.

Selected Invited Talks

Presented “A New Monte Carlo Method for Computing Marginal Likelihoods”, at the Institute of Statistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and the Biostatistics Workshop, at Stanford University, both in 2015  “Model Selection for Bayesian Survival Models Using Bregman Divergence Measure” at the 4th Rutgers Applied Probability Conference: Analytic Methods in Health Care and in Clinical Trials, 2015.

Grants

Lynn is a biostatistician for the grant “Disparities in Breast Cancer: Is Elevated Serum sLag-3 Predictor of More Aggressive Disease in African-American Women with Breast Cancer?” with Henry Smilowitz (PI) supported by Connecticut Breast Health Initiative 9/1/2015-8/31/2017  Co-PI of an NSF grant “Estimating the Bayesian Phylogenetic Information Content of Systematic Data” with Paul Lewis (PI), 2014-2017  Co- PI of a USDA/NIFA grant “Characterization of Novel Pathways Involved in Mediating Plant-Derived Molecule Inhibition of Staphylococcus Aureus Infection of Bovine Mammary Gland” with Kristen Govoni-(PI), 2012- 2015  Investigator of an NSF grant “CC-NIE Network Infrastructure: Enabling Data-Intensive Research at the University of Connecticut Through Science DMZ” with Bing Wang-(PI) 2013-2015.

Outreach

External advisor for a Ph.D. committee at WPI  Member of the financial committee of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA)  Maintained the J. P. Hsu scholarship fund and served as an advisor to the treasurer and symposium treasurer of ICSA  Member of the CDC Special Emphasis Panel of National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to review RFA-DP-16-005: Study to assess the incidence of Type 1 Diabetes in Young Adults, 2016  Organized an invited paper session, “Novel

Approaches to Genomics and Computational Molecular Evolution,” for the 10th International Chinese Statistical Association International Conference: Shanghai, 2016.

Selected Publications

Smilowitz, H.M., Micca, P.L., Sasso, D., Wu, Q., Dyment, N., Xue, C., & Kuo, L. (2016). Increasing radiation dose improves immunotherapy outcome and prolongation of tumor dormancy in a subgroup of mice treated for advanced intracerebral melanoma. Cancer Immunol Immunother, 65(2), 127- 139. DOI: 10.1007/s00262-015-1772-7

Jiang, Z., Harrington, P., Zhang, M., Marjani, S.L., Park, J., Kuo, L., Pribenszky, C., & Tian, X. (2016). Effects of high hydrostatic pressure on expression profiles of in vitro produced vitrified bovine blastocysts. Nature, Scientific Reports, 6, 21215. DOI: 10.1038/srep21215. PMID: 26883277 (PubMed- in process) PMCID: PMC4756375.

Lewis, P.O., Chen, M.-H., Kuo, L., Lewis, L.A., Fučíková , K., Neupane, S., Wang, Y.-B., & Shi, D. (2016). Estimating Bayesian phylogenetic information content, Systematic Biology. DOI:10.1093/sysbio/syw042.

Yu, F., Chen, M.-H., Kuo, L., Talbott, H., & Davis, J.S. (2015). Confident difference criterion: a new Bayesian differentially expressed gene selection algorithm with applications. BMC Bioinformatics, 16(245). DOI: 10.1186/s12859-015-0664-3.

Published Books

Chen, M.-H., Kuo, L., & Lewis, P. (Eds.) (2014). Bayesian phylogenetics: Methods, algorithms, and applications. New York, NY: Chapman & Hall (CRC).

Nitis Photo with 1.5pt black

outline Mukhopadhyay

Professor

Editorial Boards

Nitis Mukhopadhyay is the Editor-in-Chief of Sequential Analysis (since 2004). He is a Co-Editor (jointly with Carlos A. Coelho and Thomas Mathew) for a special issue of the Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice (JSTP) in honor of the 70th birthday of both Professors Bimal K. Sinha and Bikas K. Sinha (Expected date of Publication: August 2017). He is a member of the Advisory Board for SLJAS and Associate Editors of the Communications in Statistics, Statistical Methodology, and Calcutta Statistical Association Bulletin.

Selected Invited Talks

Nitis Mukhopadhyay was Co-Chair for the 5th International Workshop in Sequential Methodologies, Columbia University, New York, June 22-24, 2015. Organized one plenary session and chaired it. Also, organized more than six invited paper sessions, and chaired one of them.  Gave an invited paper presentation at the 4th Rutgers Applied Probability Conference, October 23-25, 2015.  Invited Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, India hosted by Professor Saibal Chattopadhyay, December 25, 2015-January 14, 2016.  Chair for the 9th Calcutta Triennial Statistics Symposium, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India, December 28-30, 2015. Organized the conference, chaired the opening ceremony, and chaired the session for Keynote address. Also chaired the committee of the judges for all poster presentations to select top three award winners.  During January 7-10, 2016, he was invited to visit two national institutes NSHM and NIT in Durgapur, India: (a) On January 8, 2016, he presented a plenary lecture at the NSHM College of Management and Technology, Durgapur on “Statistical Science and Its Role in Interdisciplinary Research” for their annual program on faculty development (hosted by Professor Niloy Sarkar). (b) On January 9, 2016, he presented a keynote lecture (Peter F. Drucker Memorial Lecture) on “Do We Necessarily Have More Information with More Data?” in the 3rd International Conference on Business & Information Management organized (ICBIM) by the NIT, Durgapur (hosted by Professor Partha Sengupta).  An invited plenary lecture “Sufficiency-Ancillarity-Information: Inferences on “Nile”-type Examples and a Common Mean” at the Probability & Statistics Day 2016: A Celebration of Bimal Sinha’s 70th Birthday hosted by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Maryland, Baltimore, May 20-21, 2016 (Organizing Chair: Thomas Mathew).  Member, International Program Committee for the 8th International Workshop in Applied Probability held in Toronto, Canada, June 19-23, 2016. Had organized four invited paper sessions and chaired them. Two Ph.D. advisees, Sudeep R. Bapat and Yan Zhuang attended this IWAP and presented full-length invited papers jointly authored with Mukhopadhyay. Mukhopadhyay also presented an invited paper in a session organized by Professor S. Zacks.  Co-Chair for the 6th International Workshop in Sequential Methodologies, University of Rouen, Rouen, France, June 20-23, 2017.

Grants

Nitis Mukhopadhyay received travel grants from UCRF-AAUP and Taylor & Francis Group (publisher of Sequential Analysis) to partially fund in connection with his invited trips to Calcutta University, IIMC, NSHM and NIT (both in Durgapur, India)), and ICBIM in Durgapur during December 2015-January 2016), and IWAP2016 in Toronto, Canada (June, 2016).

Outreach

Vice-President, Calcutta Statistical Association and a Member of the Council, Calcutta Statistical Association (2010-present)  Member of the International Program Committee for the 8th International Workshop in Applied Probability at Toronto, Canada held in June, 2016. Organizer and Chair for invited paper sessions  Member of the Committee on Archives and Historical Materials of the American Statistical Association (appointment ended on December 31, 2015)  Served as a designated mentor for young participants at the JSM (August 2015 and August 2016).

Selected Publications

Mukhopadhyay, N. & Bapat, S.R. (2016). Multistage point estimation methodologies for a negative exponential location under a modified Linex loss function: Illustrations with infant mortality and bone marrow data. Sequential Analysis, 35, 387–412.

Banerjee, S. & Mukhopadhyay, N. (2016). A general sequential fixed-accuracy confidence interval estimation methodology for a positive parameter: Illustrations using health and safety data. Annals of Institute of Statistical Mathematics, 68, 541-570.

De, S.K. & Mukhopadhyay, N. (2015). Fixed-accuracy interval estimation of the common variance in a equi-correlated normal distribution. Sequential Analysis, 34, 364-386.

Mukhopadhyay, N. & Pepe, W. (2014). Plug-in two-stage and sequential normal density estimation under MISE loss: Both mean and variance are unknown. Sequential Analysis, 33, 205-230.

Published Books

Mukhopadhyay, N., Datta, S., & Chattopadhyay, S. (2004). Applied sequential methodologies. Marcel Dekker (Taylor & Francis Group). ISBN: 0-8247-5395-X

Mukhopadhyay, N. & de Silva, B.M. (2009). Sequential methods and their applications. London: Chapman & Hall/CRC. ISBN: 13:978-1-58488-105-5

Mukhopadhyay, N. (2006). Introductory statistical inference. Marcel Dekker (Taylor & Francis Group). ISBN: 13:978-1-57444-613-5

Mukhopadhyay, N. (2000). Probability and Statistical Inference. Marcel Dekker (Taylor & Francis Group). ISBN: 0-8247-0379-0.

Vladimir Photo with 1.5pt black outline Pozdnyakov

Professor

Selected Invited Talks

Vladimir Pozdnyakov gave the following invited talks this year: “Repeated Significance Tests under Budget Constraints” at The Fifth International Workshop in Sequential Methodologies, June 2015, Columbia University, NY and “Discretely Observed Brownian Motion Governed by a Telegraph Process: Estimation” at The Eighth International Workshop on Applied Probability, June 2016, Toronto, Canada.

Outreach

Member of the Scientific Program Committee and Session Organizer for the 8th International Workshop in Applied Probability – IWAP 2016, Toronto, Canada, June 20-23, 2016.

Selected Publications

Pozdnyakov, V. & Steele, J. M. (2016). Buses, bullies and bijections, Mathematics Magazine, 89, 167-176.

Chi, Z., Pozdnyakov, V., & Yan, J. (2015). On expected occupation time of Brownian bridge. Statistics and Probability Letters, 97, 83-87.

Yan, J., Chen, Y., Lawrence-Apfel, K., Ortega, I. M., Pozdnyakov, V., Williams, S., & Meyer, T. (2014). A moving-resting process with an embedded Brownian motion for animal movements. Population Ecology, 56, 401-415.

Pozdnyakov, V., Meyer, T., Wang, Y., & Yan, J. (2014). On modeling animal movements using Brownian motion with measurement error. Ecology, 95, 247-253.

Nalini

Ravishanker

Professor

Editorial Boards

Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Statistical Review effective January 2016  Associate Editor of the Journal of Forecasting

Selected Invited Talks

Presented invited talks at PUCP-Lima (July 2015) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (April 2016). She also presented invited talks at these conferences: International Society of Business and Industrial Statistics, ISBIS, Campinas, Brazil (July 2015), and the International Statistical Institute, ISI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (July 2015), a conference to honor Vijay Nair, U. Michigan (October 2015), SAMSI GDRR Workshop, Raleigh NC (May 2016), ISBIS, Barcelona, Spain (June 2016), and JSM, Chicago (August 2016).

Grants

Co-P.I. with John Ivan (Civil and Environmental Engineering), and Rebecca Townsend, (Manchester Community College) on a Year 25 New England University Transportation Center Grant, Social Network Effects on Attitudes about Pedestrian Street Crossing Behavior, 2015 -2017. She also received a grant from NSF for student support at the Quality and Productivity Research Conference 2017 (see www.qprc2017.org).

Outreach

President-elect of the International Society of Business and Industrial Statistics (2015). She organized invited sessions at QPRC 2015, ISBIS 2015 and 2016, and ISI 2015. From 2014-2016, she ran a Pre College Summer @ UConn: Sorting through the deluge of data! (see http://precollege-summer.uconn.edu/). She continues to serve as the statistics faculty coordinator for the UConn Early College Experience Program (see www.ece.uconn.edu).

Selected Publications

Thavaneswaran, A. & Ravishanker, N. (2016). Estimating equations approach for integer-valued time series models. In R. Davis, R. Lund, S. Holan & N. Ravishanker (Eds.) Handbook of Discrete-Valued Time Series. New York, NY: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

Serhiyenko, V., Mamun, S. A., Ivan, J. N., & Ravishanker, N. (2016). Fast Bayesian inference for modeling multivariate crash counts on Connecticut limited access highways. Analytic Methods in Accident Research, 9, 44-53.

Pai, J. S. & Ravishanker, N. (2015). Fast approximate likelihood evaluation for stable VARFIMA processes. Statistics and Probability Letters, 103, 160-168.

Ravishanker, N., Venkatesan, R., & Hu, S. (2015). Dynamic models for time series of counts with a marketing application. In R. Davis, R. Lund, S. Holan, & N. Ravishanker (Eds.), Handbook of Discrete-Valued Time Series. New York, NY: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

Published Books

Davis, R. A., Holan, S. H., Lund, R. & Ravishanker, N. (2016). Handbook of discrete-valued time series. New York, NY: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

Ravishanker, N., & Dey, D. (2002). A first course in linear model theory. New York, NY: Chapman Hall/CRC.

Elizabeth

Schifano

Assistant Professor

Selected Invited Talks

Presented invited talks at the New England Statistics Symposium, Yale University, New Haven, CT, April 2016 and the Modern Modeling Methods Conference, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, May 2016.

She was also an invited speaker at the Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, September 2016.

Grants

PI on a subcontract from the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center through the Connecticut Department of Public Health to study the effect of environmental tobacco smoke on asthma severity in children (2015-2016)  Currently a co-investigator on a grant funded by Travelers Insurance entitled “Modeling and Analysis of Large Insurance Claim and Occurrence Data: A partnership between UConn and Travelers Insurance” with PI Dipak Dey (2016 – 2017)  As co-investigator, she is also completing an R34 grant funded by the NIH entitled “Preliminary Study of a Yoga Program to Catalyze Health Behavior Change” with PI Crystal Park (2014-2016) and a grant funded by the UConn Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention entitled “Exercise, Bone and Cardiovascular Health in Breast Cancer Survivors” with PI Keith Bellizzi (2014-2016).

Outreach

Elizabeth Schifano is an elected member of the Applied Public Health Statistics Section Council of the American Public Health Association (APHA).

Selected Publications

Schifano, E. D., Wu, J., Wang, C., Yan, J., & Chen, M.-H. (2016). Online updating for inference in the big data setting. Technometrics, 58(3), 393–403.

Sofer, T., Schifano, E. D., Hoppin, J. A., Hou, L., & Bacarelli, A. (2013). A-clustering: A novel method for the detection of co-regulated methylation regions, and regions associated with exposure. Bioinformatics, 29(22), 2884-2891.

Schifano, E. D., Li, L., Christiani, D. C., & Lin, X. (2013). Genome-wide association analysis for multiple continuous secondary phenotypes. American Journal of Human Genetics, 92(5), 744-759.

Strawderman, R. L., Wells, M. T., & Schifano, E. D. (2013). Hierarchical bayes, maximum a posteriori estimators, and minimax concave penalized likelihood estimation. Electronic Journal of Statistics, 7, 973-990.

Rick Vitale

Professor

Editorial Boards

Rick Vitale is on the Editorial Board of Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability.

Selected Invited Talks

In 2016, Rick Vitale gave an invited talk on “Gaussian Processes and Convex Geometry” at the International Workshop on Applied Probability – 2016, Toronto, Canada.

Selected Publications

Fresen, D., & Vitale, R.A. (2014). Concentration of random polytopes around the expected convex hull. Electronic Communications in Probability, 19(59), 1–8.

Vitale, R.A. (2010). Convex bodies and Gaussian processes. Image Analysis and Stereology. 29, 13–19.

Rubin, H., & Vitale, R. A. (1980). Asymptotic distribution of symmetric statistics. Ann. Statist., 6, 165-170.

Artstein, Z., & Vitale, R. A. (1975). A strong law of large numbers for random compact sets. Ann. Probab. 3, 879-882.

Xiaojing

Wang

Assistant Professor

Selected Invited Talks Xiaojing Wang presented invited talks at the 2016 World Meeting of International Society for Bayesian Analysis, Sardinia, Italy, June 2016 and at 2016 Spring Research Conference, Chicago, IL, USA, May 2016.

Grants

PI on a research grant from Sanofi-Aventis, U.S., for “Development of Statistical Methodology for Identifying Respondent Subgroups Using Biomarker Signature” from 05/23/2016 to 05/22/2017  Serves as a Co-PI on a research training grant from The Travelers Companies for “Modeling and Analysis of Large Insurance Claim and Occurrence Data: A Partnership Between UConn and Travelers."

Outreach

Xiaojing Wang is a member of the Committee on Membership Retention and Recruitment for American Statistical Association from 2016 to 2018.

Selected Publications

Wang, X., & Berger, J. O. (2016). Estimating shape constrained functions using a new class of Gaussian processes. Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, 4(1), 1-25.

Xie, Y., Wang, X., & Silander, J. A. (2015). Autumn phenology of deciduous forest communities respond to temperature, rainfall patterns, drought implying for complex climate change impacts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(44), 13585- 13590.

Berger, J. O. Wang, X., Shen, Lei. (2014). A Bayesian approach to subgroup identification. Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, 24(1), 110-129.

Wang, X., Berger, J. O., & Burdick, D. S. (2013). Bayesian analysis of dynamic item response models. Annals of Applied Statistics, 7(1), 126-153.

Photo with 1.5pt black Jun Yan outline

Professor

Editorial Boards

Jun Yan is an Associate Editor of Environmental and Ecological Statistics.

Selected Invited Talks

Semiparametric Accelerated Failure Time Modeling for Clustered Failure Times From Stratified Sampling, 07/02/2016, IBS-China 4th International Biostatistics Symposium, Shanghai, China  Spatial estimating equations for detection and attribution of changes in climate extremes, 05/29/2016, China R Conference, Beijing, China  Spatial estimating equations for detection and attribution of changes in climate extremes, 02/02/2016, International Detection and Attribution Group Meeting, Boulder, CO  Spatial estimating equations with application to changes in climate extremes, 10/26/2015, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Grants

NSF DMS 1209022 has been completed. NSF DMS 1521730 is still in progress. The contract from Environment Canada this year is titled "Fingerprinting for Extremes in Detection and Attribution Analysis."

Outreach

Jun Yan taught a workshop on "Statistics for big data and an online updating approach" on July 4, 2016, and a short course on "Advanced Statistical Computing" from July 5 to July 8, 2016, at Shanghai Univeristy of Finance and Economics.

Selected Publications

Xu, G., Chiou, S., Huang, C.-Y., Wang, M.-C., & Yan, J. (2016+). Joint scale-change models for recurrent

events and failure time. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Forthcoming.

Schifano, E. D., Wu, J., Wang, C., Yan, J., & Chen, M.-H. (2016). Online updating of statistical inference in the big data setting. Technometrics 58(3), 393–403.

Aseltine, R. H., Yan, J., Fleischman, S., Katz, M., & DeFrancesco M. (2015). Race and ethnic disparities in hospital readmissions following vaginal and cesarean delivery. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 126(5), 1040–1047.

Chiou, S., Kang, S., & Yan, J. (2015). Semiparametric accelerated failure time modeling for clustered failure times from stratified sampling. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 110, 621–629.

Published Books

Dey, D. K., & Yan, J. (Eds.). (2015). Extreme value modeling and risk analysis: Methods and applications. New York, NY: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

Yuping Zhang Assistant Professor

Editorial Boards Yuping Zhang is a member of the editorial board of Frontiers in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Selected Invited Talks

Eastern North American Region of International Biometric Society Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, USA, 2016  13rd Annual Conference on Frontiers in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Newark, New Jersey, USA, 2016  The Third Taihu International Statistics Forum, Shanghai, China, 2016  Joint Statistical Meetings, Chicago, IL, USA 2016  Institute for System Biology Networking Workshop, University of Connecticut, Farmington, Connecticut, USA, 2016

Grants PI on University of Connecticut Research Excellence Program Award  PI on CICATS Pre-K Scholar Award  PI on InCHIP Faculty/Researcher Affiliate Seed Grant

Outreach

Grant panelist for Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant Program, 2016  Grant panelist for NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, 2016  Young Researcher Award Committee, The 10th International Chinese Statistical Association International Conference on Global Growth of Modern Statistics in the 21st Century, 2016  Organizer of Invited Session - Recent Advances in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, ICSA 2016 International Conference, Shanghai, China  Organizer of Invited Session - Statistical Innovations of Massive Genomic Data Analysis, Eastern North American Region of International Biometric Society Annual Meeting, 2016, Austin, Texas, USA  Organizer of Invited Session - Statistical Innovations for Big Statistics and Data Science, Big Statistics and Data Science Joint Conference, 2016, Beijing, China

Selected Publications

Zou, C., Zhang, Y., & Ouyang, Z. (2016). HSA: integrated multi-track Hi-C data modeling for genome-scale reconstruction of 3D chromatin structure. Genome Biology, 17: 40.

Zhang, Y., Ouyang, Z., & Zhao, H. (2016). A statistical framework for data integration through graphical models with application to cancer genomics. The Annals of Applied Statistics. Forthcoming.

Zhang, Y., & Davis, R. (2013). Principal trend analysis for time-course data with applications in genomic medicine. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 7(4), 2205-2228.

Zhang, Y., Tibshirani, R., and Davis, R. (2013). Classification of patients from time-course gene expression. Biostatistics, 14(1), 87-98.

From the Director of the

Statistical Consulting Services (SCS)

Ming-Hui Chen The Statistical Consulting Services (SCS) had another very successful and productive year. In the fall 2015, the SCS team consisted of Brain Bader, Abhishek Bishoyi, Ved Deshpande, Hao Li, M. Henry Linda, Paul McLaughlin, Aditya Mishra, Ellis Shafer, and Fan Zhang. In spring 2016, Yujing Jiang, Sarah Crothers, and Simon (Hsu-Chih) Cheng joined the team in addition to those who had worked in the SCS. Sarah (a sophomore Honors student majoring in Statistics) was the first undergraduate student hired by the SCS as an Administrative Specialist in January 2016, while Simon (Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology) was appointed by the SCS as a Specialist on Stata due to high demand of services and requests on the use of Stata. During the academic year, the SCS was jointly funded by Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), Dean’s Offices of CLAS and CAHNR, School of Pharmacy, and Department of Statistics. With the support from the Department of Statistics, SCS offered full-consulting project and walk-in services in June and July, 2016. Aditya Mishra and Daoyuan Shi were the two graduate assistants who provided statistical consulting services in the summer. Sarah had been working in the SCS in the summer as well. In fall 2015, SCS provided three types of full-consulting project service, walk-in services, and online services. Walk-in services started in Spring 2015 while online services were offered first time in fall 2015. Walk-in services with a total of 16 walk-in hours per week were held in AUST 340. Two graduate assistants were assigned to provide online services. In the fall 2015, we had 19 full- consulting projects and provided our walk-in consulting services to 55 clients and online services to 24 clients. In spring 2016, the total of walk-in service hours per week increased to 20 from 16 in fall 2015. The SCS provided services to 23 clients for full-consulting projects, 52 clients for walk- in services, and 23 clients for online services. Another major task in spring 2016 was to prepare SCS workshops. In summer 2016, SCS provided services to 5 clients for full-consulting projects and 13 clients for walk-in services. SCS hosted its first workshop event on Wednesday, May 11th, 2016. The day consisted of a series of three introductory workshops that cover survey design, power analysis / sample size calculation, and repeated measures analysis. Each session had a thorough overview of each topic and a live demonstration of various case studies. The workshop was held in Austin (AUST) 163, open to any UConn or UCHC faculty, students, or affiliated persons. The schedule of the three sessions is shown below: Session 1: Survey Design (9:30AM -11:30AM) Session 2: Power Analysis and Sample Size Calculation (1:00PM - 3:00PM) Session 3: Repeated Measures Analysis (3:30PM - 5:30PM)

Lunch was served in AUST 326 and was free to all participants. The registration website was designed by M. Henry Linder. Initially, the cap number of 40 was set for each session and was increased to 55 for each session due to high demand. About 55 attended this workshop. 10 graduate assistants who worked in SCS were divided into 3 groups to prepare workshop slides and 3 graduate assistants delivered workshop lectures in each workshop session. The presentation slides and lectures were very impressive and well-received by workshop participants. After the workshop, the online post workshop questionnaire was designed by Paul McLaughlin and a notification was sent to each participant. Overall, the first SCS workshop was a great success.

We would like to thank Stat Department Head Joseph Glaz, Associate Vice President Michelle K. Williams, CLAS Dean Jeremy Teitelbaum, CAHNR Dean Gregory Weidemann, and Professor Xiuling Lu of the School Pharmacy for their support to the SCS.

Pfizer Global Research & Development Student Fellowship Program (December 2007 - Summer, 2017) In December 2007, the Department of Statistics at University of Connecticut and the Global Research & Development of Pfizer Inc. signed a joint agreement to develop a Fellowship program. Wangang Xie was the first Student Fellow. Under the agreement, he worked at Pfizer 10 hours each week in spring 2008 and 20 hours each week in summer and fall 2008. In November 2008, the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut and the Global Research & Development of Pfizer Inc. signed a joint agreement for the extension of the Fellowship program. Miaomiao Ge became the second Student Fellow under this agreement. This agreement was extended several times. Ms. Ge was the Student Fellow until August 2011. In fall 2011 to fall 2014, Ouyang Guang was the third Pfizer Student Fellow. Jing Wu became the fourth Pfizer Student Fellow in spring 2015. Ms. Wu worked as a student fellow at Pfizer in the 2015-2016 academic year and continues to work in the summer of 2016 as well. Pfizer has extended this fellowship program to 2016-2017 for the academic year as well as the summer.

Collaboration with the Center for Nursing Research (CNR) (Fall 2007-Spring 2016)

The Center for Nursing Research (CNR) was established in 1991 to support faculty, staff, students, and community health care professionals in developing research programs. The Director of CNR is Professor Deborah Shelton. From fall 2007 to spring 2011, the CNR hired Ms. Miaomiao Ge, a Ph.D. student of the Department of Statistics, as a half-time student assistant under supervision of Professor Ming-Hui Chen. In August 2011, the CNR hired Ms. Danjie Zhang as Miaomiao Ge’s replacement. Ms. Zhang worked at the CNR 10 hours each week as a half-time graduate assistant in 2011-2012, 2012-2013, and 2013-2014 academic years. In the 2014-2015 academic, Ms. Jing Wu worked at the CNR to replace Ms. Danjie Zhang. Ms. Wu worked at the CNR in the 2015-2016 academic year. The CNR has extended a half RA support for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Faculty News

and Awards

Kun Chen Became an elected member of the International Statistical Institute

Ming-Hui Chen Elected to Fellow of International Society for Bayesian Analysis

Ofer Harel P.Stat – Accredited Professional Statistician by the American Statistical Association Became Director of Graduate Admissions

Vladimir Pozdnyakov Became Director of the Financial Mathematics Program, based in the UConn Math Department

Elizabeth Schifano Became a Faculty Undergraduate Academic Advisor for the department

Xiaojing Wang Google Travel Award for 2016 World Meeting of International Society of Bayesian Analysis NISS/ASA/IMS Travel Award in the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings

Yuping Zhang Received a Travel Award from NSF 2016

Visiting Professors The department welcomes two Visiting Assistant Professors, Fangfang Wang and Panpan Zhang, and Visiting Professor, Victor Hugo Lachos Davila, for the 2016/2017 academic year.

By Elizabeth Schifano Every year, the Department of Statistics hosts an annual Fall picnic to allow new students to get to know the current students, faculty, staff and their families, as well as to acknowledge and provide well-deserving students with Academic and Service Awards. Continuing with recent tradition, the 2016 picnic was held at Patriots Park Lodge which overlooks the lovely Coventry Lake. The Graduate Student Committee organized a wonderful afternoon with over 90 people in attendance. It was a beautiful crisp day, made complete with delicious food, great conversation, and a variety of games and sports. We are already looking forward to next year’s event!

2015-2016 Student Awards (pictured left to right) Professor Ming-Hui Chen, Gregory Vaughan (Service Award), Professor Lynn Kuo, Yang Liu (Best Performance in Probability), Yishu Xue (The H. Fairfield Smith and Dolores S. Smith Award for Excellence in Applied Statistics), Chen Zhang (Best Performance in Biostatistics), Hao Li (Best Performance in Inference), Professor Nitis Mukhopadhyay, Lijiang Geng (Gottfried Noether Award for Mathematical Statistics), Professor Jun Yan, Fan Zhang (Best Performance in Inference), Yichen Zhou (not pictured, The H. Fairfield Smith and Dolores S. Smith Award for Excellence in Applied Statistics)

Celebrating our 2016 Ph.D. graduates! (pictured left to right) Paul McLaughlin, Wenjie Wang, Jun Hu, Zaida Quiroz, Yang Liu, Brian Bader, Abhisek Saha, Jun Yan, Yan Li, Abhishek Bishoyi, Ellis Shaffer, Sudeep Bapat, Dipak Dey, Marcos Prates, Daoyuan Shi, Xiaojing Wang, Chongliang Luo, Rick Vitale, Haim Bar, Aditya Mishra

Colloquia

We continue to have a stream of excellent colloquia: Vivekananda Roy Department of Statistics, Iowa State University “Estimating standard errors for importance sampling estimators with multiple Markov chains” John W. Emerson Department of Statistics, Yale University “Topics in High-Performance Computing with R for EveRyone” Michael N. Katehakis Department of Management Science and Information Systems, Rutgers University “On the Asymptotically Optimal Behavior of Sequential Allocation Policies”

Tahir Ekin McCoy College of Business, Texas State University “Statistical Issues in Medical Fraud Assessment” Luis Carvalho Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University “A Hierarchical Statistical Model and Computational Methods for Genome-Wide Association Studies” Alan E. Gelfand Department of Statistical Science, Duke University “Spatial data and Gaussian processes: A beautiful marriage” Ting Zhang Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University “Semiparametric Model Building for Regression Models with Time-Varying Parameters” Bradley P. Carlin Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota “Bayesian Adaptive Clinical Trial Methods for Incorporating Auxiliary Data and Identifying Interesting Subgroups, with Application to Orphan Diseases” Melanie M. Wall Psychiatry Department, Columbia University “In search of an optimally valid criteria set for diagnosing alcohol use disorder” Steven Chiou T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University “Joint scale-change models for recurrent events and failure time” Qiqi Deng Boehringer-Ingelheim “Story of alpha and Beta in Clinical trials” Beatriz Etchegaray Garcia IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center “Enterprise business metric forecasting” Hongyuan Cao Department of Statistics, University of Missouri “Change point estimation: another look at multiple testing problems” Zuoheng Wang Yale School of Public Health “Longitudinal SNP Set Association Analysis of Quantitative Phenotypes” Bodhisattva Sen Department of Statistics, Columbia University “Adaptation in Shape Constrained Regression”

N. Balakrishna Department of Statistics, Cochin University of Science and Technology “Multiplicative Error Models for Non-negative Time series” Sujit K. Ghosh Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University “Dynamic Model Based Methods to Test for Biosimilarity” Thomas A. Louis Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health The Robert W. Makuch Distinguished Lecture in Biostatistics: “Perils and potentials of self-selected entry to epidemiological studies and surveys” Erin M. Conlon Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts “Parallel Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian Analysis of Big Data” Wei Wu Department of Statistics, Florida State University “Metric-based Function Registration and Its Applications” Gavino Puggioni Department of Computer Science and Statistics, The University of Rhode Island “Bayesian Spatio-Temporal CAR Models for Tropical Diseases Outbreak Prediction” Jianguo Sun Department of Statistics, University of Missouri “Sieve Maximum Likelihood Regression Analysis of Bivariate Interval-censored Failure Time Data” Zhengqing Ouyang The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine “Statistical modeling of RNA structurome from next generation sequencing”

IWAP 2016 International Worksho p in Applied Probability

By Joseph Glaz

The International Workshop in Applied Probability – IWAP 2016 was held on June 20-23, 2016, at the Sheraton Center Hotel & Convention Center, Toronto, Canada. This was the eighth International Workshop in Applied Probabilty and it was a continuation of the previous seven successful meetings which took place in Venezuela (2002), Greece (2004), USA (2006), France (2008), Spain (2010), Israel (2012) and Turkey (2014).

The workshop was attended by about 225 participants from all over the globe. The aim of this workshop was to bring together and to foster exchanges among scientists working in the applications of probability to any field, including: actuarial science, biology, communication theory, computer science, economics, engineering, epidemiology, finance, geography, linguistics, medicine, meteorology, operations research, psychology, quality control, reliability theory, and statistics. Participants at this workshop were encouraged to submit their research presentations to Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, published by Springer and edited by Joseph Glaz, University of Connecticut. The IWAP 2016 special issue of the journal, is co-edited by Guest Editors: Markos Koutras, University of Piraeus, Greece, Nikolaos Limnios, Technical University of Compiegne, France, Wendy Lou, University of Toronto, Canada, and Thomas Taimre, University of Queensland, Australia.

IWAP 2016 was organized by Wendy Lou, University of Toronto, and hosted and co-sponsored by Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. The Mayor John Troy, City of Toronto, has extended his welcome to all the paricipants at the workshop. It was organized with advice from its International Board: Joseph Glaz, University of Connecticut, USA, Juerg Huesler, Bern University, Switzerland, Markos Koutras, Univesrity of Piraeus, Greece, Nikolaos Limnios, Technical University of Compiegne, France, and Jose Luis Palacios, University of Simon Bolivar, Venezuela. The Scientific Committee included leading scientists in diverse areas of research in applied probability from all over the world. Its members helped organizing 66 invited sessions, with 198 lectures. The scientific program included five plenary lectures delivered by leading researchers in applied probability: Miklos Csorgo, Carleton University, Canada, Markos Koutras, University of Piraeus, Greece, Ernesto Mordecki, University of the Republic, Uruguay, Jeffrey Rosenthal, University of Toronto, Canada, and Elena Yarovaya, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia.

The local organizing committee had done a great job in organizing this international workshop. The participants at this conference praised both the strong scientific program and interesting social events. Joseph Glaz ([email protected])

Upcoming

Conferences

The 31st New England Statistics Symposium, April 21--22, 2017

The 31st New England Statistics Symposium (NESS) will be held at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, on the spring weekend of April 21-22, 2017. It will be exactly 30 years since the 1st NESS hosted at UConn! NESS is an annual conference that started from UConn, moves throughout the New England region in even-years, and comes back to UConn in odd-years. The purpose of each NESS is to bring together statisticians from all over New England and nationally to share research development, discuss emerging issues in the field, and network with colleagues. Short courses take place on Friday, while keynote addresses, parallel sessions, and poster sessions are scheduled on Saturday. In recent years there has been a student paper competition and a student poster award sponsored by our industrial parterns. The NESS committee consists of Professors Haim Bar, Jun Yan (chair), and Yuping Zhang. Please watch your email box and our website (http://stat.uconn.edu/ness/) as more details of the conference become available. If you have session or short course ideas, feel free to contact any committee member.

2017 Conference on Lifetime Data Science, May 25-27, 2017

The LIDA Interest Group is planning a conference, entitled ``Data science, precision medicine and risk analysis with lifetime data,'' which will be held at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, on May 25--27, 2017. The theme of the conference is to promote and support the development, application and appropriate use of statistical methods for lifetime or time-to-event data in data science, precision medicine and risk analysis. The conference is co-sponsored by the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA).

Jack Kalbfleisch from the University of Michigan is the conference chair. Mei-Cheng Wang from the Johns Hopkins University serves as the chair of the program committee to organize technical sessions of the conference. Ming-Hui Chen and Jun Yan from the University of Connecticut are taking the leadership role for the local arrangement. The conference will include workshops (short courses), keynote speeches, invited and contributed sessions, and students' poster sessions. Three

41 posters will be selected, with prizes, and recognized at the conference. The initial plans for the conference have received enthusiastic feedback and we expect a well-attended meeting with 200+ participants. A website has been developed to provide preliminary information of the conference: {http://merlot.stat.uconn.edu/lida/}.

2017 Quality and Productivity Research Conference, June 12-15, 2017

The ASA Q&P Section’s Quality and Productivity Research Conference will be hosted by the University of Connecticut and held in Storrs, CT, between June 13 and 15, 2017. The theme of this year’s conference is Quality and Statistics: A Path to Better Life. A short course on Computational Bayesian Methods for Big Data Problems will be given on June 12, 2017 by Steve Scott, Director of Statistics Research at Google.

The goal of the conference is to stimulate interdisciplinary research among statisticians, scientists, and engineers in quality and productivity, industrial needs, and the physical engineering and health sciences. The conference will honor Prof. Shelemyahu Zacks, SUNY Binghamton. Plenary lectures will be given by Bill Meeker, Iowa State University and Vijay Nair, Wells Fargo. The Scientific Program Committee consists of Martha Gardner (GE), Joseph Glaz and Nalini Ravishanker (UConn), Dan Jeske (UC Riverside), Bill Meeker (Iowa State), Refik Soyer (GWU) and Emmanuel Yashchin (IBM Research). The Local Organizing committee is co-chaired by Haim Bar and Nalini Ravishanker (UConn) and also includes Xiaojing Wang and Henry Linder (UConn) and Jian Zou (WPI).

Statistical issues and research approaches drawn from collaborative research will be highlighted at the conference. A poster session will highlight graduate and undergraduate student research on these topics. An important objective of the QPRC is to encourage student participation. Scholarships for participation in the conference include the Mary G. and Joseph Natrella Scholarships and QPRC Student Scholarships. Additionally, for QPRC 2017, graduate students and undergraduate students from US academic institutions may seek National Science Foundation (NSF) travel awards to participate and present their research. Please see the conference website, http://qprc2017.org, for more details.

Alumni News

Deepak Agarwal Became an ASA Fellow in 2014. Pantea Alirezazadeh Is an Analyst for 1010 Data. Brien Aranov Is a Senior Consultant of Personal Insurance Research & Development at Travelers Insurance. Sudipto Banerjee Professor and Chair, Department of Biostatistics, University of California, Los Angeles and has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). Swarnali Banerjee Is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. Jennifer (Boyko) McGinniss Principal Biostatistician at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Wen Cao Is a student at the NYU Stern School of Business in New York City. Brad Carlin Chair of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota and is still enjoying the job for the most part. He continues to focus primarily on methods for Bayesian adaptive clinical trials and network meta-analysis. He is also still leader of “the Bayesian band,” which has a new name and website: www.imposteriors.com. Bhargab Chattopadhyay Made full-length invited paper presentation during the IWAP held in Jerusalem, Israel in June 2012 and chaired an invited paper session during the 4th IWSM hosted by the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia-Athens in July 2013. Saibal Chattopadhyay Professor, was appointed to the highly prestigious position of the Director at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta in Calcutta, India, effective April 2013. Ashok Chaurasia Has accepted a faculty position with the University of Waterloo, School of Public Health and Health Systems, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Steven Chiou Has joined Harvard University’s Biostatistics Department as a post-doc after two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Ulysses Diva Is now working with AstraZeneca in Wilmington, DE as a Principal Statistician. Gulsum Cinar Dolgun Is an Expert Assistant at TCMB. Rongwei Fu Has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor at the Oregon Science and Health University, Portland, OR. Elijah Gaoioni Has joined New York Life Insurance Company as a Corporate Vice President, Data Science. Miaomiao Ge Principal Biostatistician at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Sujit Ghosh Was selected to serve as one of the Program Directors in the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) within the National Science Foundation (NSF) beginning September 2013. Recently, he was offered the position of the Deputy Director of Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) beginning September 2014. Recently, he was elected President of the International Indian Statistical Association. Gyuhyeong Goh Has joined Kansas State University as an Assistant Professor. Enida Halilovic Is an IT Project Analyst for United Health Care insurance company. Patrick Harrington Is employed by Genomic Health Inc. Shan Hu A great alumna and dear friend, Shan Hu passed away unexpectedly in March 2016. She was an excellent student who received her Ph.D. in Statistics in 2012. Everyone who knew Shan will fondly remember her shining smile and positive attitude regardless of what life threw her way. She was a genuinely good person, shining at what she did, and always willing to help people around her. She will be very much missed by all of us who had overlap with her at UConn.

John (Anthony) Labarga Is an Advanced Analytics Intern at Travelers Insurance. Chantal Larose

Assistant Professor of Decision Science (Statistics) at State University of New York at New Paltz Wenqing Li Is a Director of Biostatistics and Data Management at Ventana Medical Systems, Inc. in Tucson, AZ. Gong-Yi Liao Is employed by the Northern Trust Company. Qi Liao Is a statistician at Merkle. Dan Liu Received a letter for Teaching Excellence from the Provost and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. Is a Statistician at Yale University Careers. Junfeng Liu Professor in the Department of Statistics, School of Mathematics and Information Sciences, YanTai University, Shandong, China Xue Liu Has joined Towers Watson as an Actuarial Analyst. Zhuping Liu Is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin in Marketing. Bani Mallick Is the new University Distinguished Professor at Texas A & M University. Madhuja Mallick Is an Associate Director at Forest Laboratories, Inc. Gregory Matthews Gregory is expecting a baby and won the 2016 SABR Contemporary Baseball Analysis Award. Athanasios Christou Micheas Has become an Associate Editor for the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation and serves the Department of Statistics at the University of Missouri as the Director of Graduate Studies. He is currently writing a book titled “Theory and Modeling of Stochastic Objects – Point Processes to Random Sets.” Jaydip Mukhopadhyay Is the director of Model Risk and Governance at American Express in Gurgaon, India. Stephen O’Malley Is an Analytics Manager at Health Dialog. Guang Ouyang Is a Data Scientist at Id Analytics, Inc.

Valerie Pare Is a Professor of Practice at Wesleyan University. Sankha Muthu Poruthotage Has joined Plymouth Insurance, Boston, MA. Sairam Rayaprolu Has joined Disney as a Decision Science Consultant in Orlando, FL. Dooti Roy Has joined Boerhinger-Ingelheim Pharmaceutical Company in Ridgefield, CT as a Senior Biostatistician. Abhisek Saha Has joined the University of Texas Department of Biostatistics M.D. Anderson Cancer Center as a postdoctoral fellow Hongwei Shang Works at HP Analytics Labs. Tumulesh K. S. Solanky Professor and Head, Department of Mathematics at the University of New Orleans Elizabeth Tripp Is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Math Department at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire a member of the Epsilon of Connecticut Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in recognition of her superlative academic achievements. Chun Wang Is a Senior Analyst at Liberty Mutual Insurance Xiao (Leo) Wang Has joined Millennium Management investment company in New York, NY as a fixed income trader Xiaojing Wang At Google, Inc. assisted in the fundraising efforts that led to the Google Poster Award at the 29th New England Statistics Symposium Yu-Bo Wang Is a Post-Doctorate Fellow at NIH Yue Wang Is working for Aetna Insurance Company as an Analyst Zhuo Wang Is an Assistant Professor at Shenzhen University Ziwen Wei

Is employed at Merck & Co., Inc. Qianzhu Wu Is a Senior Analyst, Data Science at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in Franklin, MA Rui Wu Is employed at Boerhinger-Ingelheim Pharmaceutical Company in Ridgefield, CT Hui Yao Is a Senior Predictive Modeler at Ernst & Young Jieyang Zang Is a Customer Data Analyst at Symphony EYC Danjie Zhang Is a Biostatistician II at Gilead Sciences, Inc. Bo Zhao Senior Consultant at Travelers Insurance

JSM 2016 Alumni and Friends Dinner

Student News

Graduate Student Committee 2016-2017 (pictured left to right) Siddhesh Kulkarni (Senator), Yang Liu (Senator), Greg Vaughan (President), Shariq Mohammed (Vice President), Jun Hu (Treasurer), Chen Zhang (Secretary) Members not pictured - Yang Liu (BIST), Yueqi Wang & Yizhou Xie

The Graduate Student Committee is a recently revamped organization that is dedicated to addressing the concerns of the graduate students and working closely with the faculty members to organize social and academic events. This year the Committee has already helped to organize the annual department picnic and is currently working on registering with UConn as an official student organization to be eligible for funding from the Graduate Student Senate. The Committee also plans to organize additional events for the Spring semester.

Chen Zhang (Advisor Mukhopadhyay) The H. Fairfield Smith and Dolores S. Smith Award for Excellence in Applied Statistics Best Performance in Biostatistics Award

Peitao Wu (Advisor Chi) Gottfried Noether Award

Gregory Vaughn (Advisor K. Chen, Yan) Department of Statistics Teaching Award Service Award

Dooti Roy (Advisor Dey) Department of Statistics Service Award

Fan Zhang (Advisor M.-H. Chen) Best Performance in Probability Award Best Performance in Inference Award

Yu-Bo Wang (Advisor Kuo, M.-H. Chen) 2015 IBM Student Paper Award for “A New Monte Carlo Method for Computing Marginal Likelihoods”

Hee-Koung Joeng (Advisor M.-H. Chen) Department of Statistics Service Award

Matthew Linder (Advisor Zhang) Received a letter for Teaching Excellence from the Provost and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Paul McLaughlin (Advisor Bar) Received a letter for Teaching Excellence from the Provost and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Ved Deshpande (Advisor Dey, Schifano) Student Poster Competition Winner, NESS 2016 Department of Statistics Service Award

Yang Liu (Advisor M.-H. Chen, Wang) Best Performance in Probability Award

Yishu Xue (Advisor Schifano, Yan) The H. Fairfield Smith and Dolores S. Smith Award for Excellence in Applied Statistics

Hao Li (Advisor M.-H. Chen) Best Performance in Inference Award

Lijiang Geng (Advisor M.-H. Chen) Gottfried Noether Award for Mathematical Statistics

Yichen Zhou (Advisor Chi) The H. Fairfield Smith and Dolores S. Smith Award for Excellence in Applied Statistics

ASA Datafest Competition

A team of UConn undergraduates– Daniel Brink ’16, Nicholas Illenberger ’17, Jiachen Liang ’16, and Peter Tallcouch ’16–won an award for “Best Business Insight” at the American Statistical Association (ASA) Datafest competition, held at Wesleyan University from April 8-10. The students’ task was to analyze a dataset provided by Ticketmaster, and provide some new insights.

The students were advised by Professor Haim Bar, Professor Ofer Harel, Professor Nalini Ravishanker, and graduate students, Henry Linder and Yaohua Zhang. Also in attendance to support the UConn team were graduate students, Brian Bader, Ved Deshpande, and Greg Vaughan.

Recent

Graduates

Recent Bachelor’s Jayson Arseneault, Loren Baczewski, Duncan Bishop, Julia Bondy, Daniel Brink, Jinming Cao, Laura Carey, Bradley Carrier, Yisung Chen, Allison Colberg, Raychel Decker, Lily Feroce, Patrick Frye, Heather Goodwin, Suzana Hamideh, Cassey Jacobs, Brian Joyce, Zachary Kaplove, Jennifer Kellogg, Emily Lachapelle, Sen Li, Jiachen Liang, Nicole Mcrae, Kevin McGrath, Xiangyu Mo, Nicholas Miner, Dana Nguyen, Joshua O’Neill, Corrin Powell, Abigail Szach, Sujun Wang, Joseph Cassidy, Ryan Marsalisi, Hyunjae Rhee, Milena Skwarek, Chris Thai, Alexander Vidakovic, Frank Wunscheliv, Kai Zeng, Yuan Zhan, Sihong Zhou

Recent Master’s Aaron Palmer, Anqi Zhou, Yi Cao, Dooti Roy, Lele Fu, Liyang Xie, Man Xu, Ved Deshpande, Chongliang Luo, Aditya Kumar Mishra, Shan Chen, Shengchuan Guo, John Anthony Labarga, Yixin Li, Yixuan Li, Yuqing Li, Kun Liang, Dan Liu, Wei Shi, Ruida Song, Fan Wu, Fan Wu, Peitao Wu, Jinhui Yang, Tianying Zhao, Jiadong Zhu, Daoyuan Shi, Junjia Bai, Liying Jin, Xiaochen Lin, Bo Pang, Joel Sinofsky, Wenxiao Xiao, Jiawei Zhang, Yi Zhao

Recent Ph.D.’s Hee-Koung Joeng, Chun Wang, Yu-Bo Wang, Qianzhu Wu, Abhisek Saha

Attention, Alumni!

We want to hear from you!

UConn Statistics Alumni:

We would love an update on your current activities. Please send updates (professional and/or personal) to [email protected] to be included in the next issue of the newsletter. Please be sure to include the year you graduated and the degree received in your email.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you! The Department of Statistics

Department Directory Robert Apruzese, Adjunct Lecturer [email protected] Robert Aseltine, UConn Health Joint Appointment [email protected] Haim Bar, Assistant Professor [email protected] Tracy Burke, Secretary [email protected] Joseph Cappelleri, Adjunct Professor (Pfizer) [email protected] Kun Chen, Assistant Professor [email protected] Ming-Hui Chen, Professor and Head [email protected] Zhiyi Chi, Professor and Associate Head [email protected] Victor Hugo Lachos Davila, Visiting Professor [email protected] Dipak K. Dey, Distinguished Professor [email protected] Joseph Glaz, Professor [email protected] Ofer Harel, Professor [email protected] Kent Holsinger, EEB Joint Appointment [email protected] Tania Huedo-Medina, Allied Health Joint Appointment [email protected] Lynn Kuo, Professor [email protected] Paul Lewis, EEB Joint Appointment [email protected] Suman Majumdar, Associate Professor (Stamford) [email protected] Kathleen McLaughlin, Adjunct Lecturer [email protected] Nitis Mukhopadhyay, Professor [email protected] Megan Petsa, Program Assistant [email protected] Vladimir Pozdnyakov, Professor and Director of Financial Math [email protected] Zhanna Pozdnyakova, Adjunct Lecturer [email protected] Nalini Ravishanker, Professor [email protected] Elizabeth Schifano, Assistant Professor [email protected] Naitee Ting, Adjunct Professor (Boehringer-Ingelheim) [email protected] Emiliano Valdez, Math Joint Appointment [email protected] Rick Vitale, Professor [email protected] Stephen Walsh, School of Nursing Joint Appointment [email protected] Fangfang Wang, Visiting Assistant Professor [email protected] Xiaojing Wang, Assistant Professor [email protected] Michael Willig, CESE Joint Appointment [email protected] Jun Yan, Professor [email protected] Panpan Zhang, Visiting Assistant Professor [email protected] Yuping Zhang, Assistant Professor [email protected]