2024 Statistics Newsletter
Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
Department Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Message from the Chair
Greetings to all of our alumni from the George Washington University Department of Statistics!
I am delighted to share updates that highlight some recent achievements within our community. Inside this newsletter, you’ll discover news from our alumni, breakthrough research from our faculty and summaries of key departmental events, including several conferences.
The Jerome Cornfield Prize Fund enabled the creation of two new student awards in 2024: the Cornfield Award for Academic Excellence and Engagement, and the Cornfield Achievement Award for an Outstanding PhD Qualifier Exam. These additions complement the three existing department awards.
Looking ahead, we are excited to celebrate the 90th anniversary of our department in 2025. We warmly invite you to join us for this significant milestone. For those of you planning to attend the 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings in Portland, please be sure to visit our Alumni Reception.
We invite alumni to respond to the survey to mentor our current students, and to visit and engage in other activities within the department.
Additionally, we invite you to follow our LinkedIn page and join the GW Statistics Alumni Group to stay connected.
Thank you for your ongoing support and involvement. Let’s keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Huixia Judy Wang
Chair, Department of Statistics
Department Spotlights
Feifang Hu’s Breakthroughs Aids Clinical Trials and IT Testing
Professor Feifang Hu is a leading figure in developing adaptive design methods for randomized control trials and A/B testing in the IT industry. His groundbreaking innovations enhance the efficiency and ethics of trials, reducing costs and speeding up the introduction of new therapies to the market.
Professor Hu also extends these advanced techniques to optimize IT testing processes, ensuring adaptability and responsiveness to initial data. In his recent 2024 publication in the Journal of the American Statistical Association titled “A New and Unified Family of Covariate Adaptive Randomization (CAR) Procedures and Their Properties,” Professor Hu and his collaborators introduced a novel class of CAR procedures that improve estimation efficiency for treatment effects by balancing covariates.
He published another significant contribution, co-authored with statistics alumnus Yang Liu, MS ’17, PhD ’22, (now a faculty member at Renmin University), titled “The Impacts of Unobserved Covariates on Covariate-Adaptive Randomized Experiments,” in The Annals of Statistics (2024). Furthermore, Professor Hu co-developed the R package “carat,” a vital tool in adaptive research, which has been downloaded over 50,000 times since its 2021 release.
Fang Jin Promoted to Associate Professor
Professor Fang Jin, a winner of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, was promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective fall 2024. Her research focuses on natural language processing, deep learning interpretation and machine learning applications in health care.
Her CAREER award honored her pioneering work titled “Unified Model-agnostic Interpretation Framework for Deep Predictive Models.” Her recent work was chosen for presentation at the International World Wide Web Conference 2024. The study addresses the opacity problem in text generation by large language models, proposing model-agnostic techniques to improve both the accuracy and interpretability of natural language models. Their interpreter, combined with a denoising strategy, significantly enhances token-level interpretation in terms of both rationality and fidelity.
Over the past year, Professor Jin’s lab has been working with Children’s National Hospital to develop forecasting models for the ICU in the Division of Cardiac Critical Care Medicine.
Department Kudos
- GW recently signed a cooperation agreement with the School of Statistics and Management of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE) for a 3+1+1 program in statistics. SUFE is a premier research university, renowned for its focus on finance, economics and management disciplines. We look forward to this new international collaboration.
- Doctoral student Guannan Chen was awarded the 2024 Graduate Student Teaching Prize, recognizing exceptional teaching skills and invaluable support to instructors as a graduate teaching assistant in statistics.
- After 52 years of distinguished service, Professor Joseph Gastwirth retired in 2024. Professor Gastwirth’s commitment to excellence has not only shaped many research areas but also inspired generations of students and colleagues. We are grateful for his enduring contributions and look forward to his continued association with the department as an emeritus faculty member. Wishing Professor Gastwirth all the best in his well-deserved retirement!
- MS student Yawen Gu received the 2024 Cornfield Award for Academic Excellence and Engagement, a newly established award given to an MS student in statistics considering academic performance and participation in co-curricular departmental activities.
- The department, led by Professor Subrata Kundu, organized the first-ever Georges' STAT DAY, hosted by the department in March. Census Director Robert Santos delivered the keynote address, “How a ‘Community-of-the Whole’ Approach Informs Our Road to the 2030 Census.” The event was jointly organized with the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at GW and the Department of Statistics, George Mason University. The event featured a panel discussion on "”Opportunities and Challenges for Statisticians in the Era of AI,” invited talks, student talks and poster presentations. The day-long event was attended by more than 100 participants.
- Professor Joshua Landon was a member of the organizing committee for the symposium “New Frontiers in Reliability and Risk Analysis: A Tribute to Nozer D. Singpurwalla” at GW and noted it was a successful event with more than 80 participants. It featured two plenary talks given by Professors Jim Berger (Duke University) and Jayaram Sethuraman (Florida State University), 25 talks and a poster session where many students presented their works.
- Junior biology and statistics major Chaitrali Patil presented her work at the inaugural CCAS Research Showcase.
- Doctoral student Zexin Ren received the 2024 Cornfield Award for Outstanding Qualifying Exam Achievement, a newly established award given to a PhD in statistics student who has passed the qualifying exam with high distinction.
- Doctoral student Xinyue Zhao was awarded the 2024 Fritz Scheuren Prize for Leadership and Service. This award is given annually to a full-time student majoring in statistics, in recognition of their exceptional leadership and service to the community.
- Professor Xiaoke Zhang received a $18,400 NSF award to partially support the conference “Statistics in the Age of AI,” hosted at GW in May 2024. The conference featured two short courses, seven talk sessions, one poster session and two panel discussions. More than 160 participants attended the full two-day conference, and more than 50 participants attended the short one-day courses. Statisticians from various backgrounds not only demonstrated the cutting-edge advances of statistics in the AI landscape, but also had in-depth discussions on the future of statistical research, education and practice in the era of AI.
- Doctoral student Yi Zhang won the 2024 Minna Mirin Kullback Memorial Prize for Research and Scholarship, an annual award given by the department to recognize excellent research by GW PhD students in statistics.
Alumni Class Notes
- Jie Cong, PhD ’18, received an FDA Outstanding Service award.
- Chen Chen, PhD ’21, was promoted to manager at AbbVie 4.
- Ahmad Emad, MS ’23, a data scientist at Google, joined New York University as an adjunct faculty member.
- Kyle Harbacek, BS ’11, is a senior solution architect at NVIDIA.
- Jing-ning Hsu, BS ’23, started a new position at UNO International Trade Strategy.
- Dalong Huang, PhD ’08, statistical team lead at the FDA, received the FDA CDER excellence in mentoring award.
- Xin Li, PhD ’19, was promoted to senior principal biostatistician at Incyte.
- Diana Liu, MS ’12, principal data scientist at Fidelity, finished an AI professional degree at Stanford. She also serves as an advisory board member of Soar.com, a software development company focusing on uplifting humanity using AI.
- Kaitlyn McAuliffe, BS ’11, is a research manager with Amazon.
- Rui Miao, PhD ’22, started a new position as mathematical statistician at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
- Nicholas Sawka, BS ’18, is a senior data analyst at PXYData.
- Kimberly F. Sellers, PhD ’01, started a new position as the head of the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University.
- Natalie Smith, BS ’19, started a new position at Booz Allen Hamilton as a data science specialist.
- Wanjie Sun, PhD ’13, master mathematical statistician at the FDA, was elected FDASA president.
- Mian Wang, MS ’16, was promoted to the business intelligence engineer II position at Amazon.
- Zhou Yang, PhD ’23, started a new position as an FDA mathematical statistician.
- Laura Yee, BS ’08, started a new position as head of the Biostatistics and Data Management Section at the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute.
- Yuhao Zhang, PhD ’23, started a new position as an FDA mathematical statistician.
- Zidan Zhang, MS ’17, started a new position at Amazon as a business intelligence engineer.
- Haojin Zhou, PhD ’11, started a new position as assistant professor at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.
- Yifan Zhou, PhD ’21, is a principal clinical data scientist with Boehringer Ingelheim.