2017 Department Awards

The diploma ceremony for the Department of Statistics will include formal recognition of recipients of the dissertation and teaching assistant awards. A new honor was created this year with the renaming of the applied statistics thesis prize for our emeritus colleague, Jerry Friedman.

In addition to the annual department TA awards, 2017 sees the presentation of the biennial Centennial Teaching Assistant Awards for outstanding instruction, service, and dedication by teaching assistants in the schools of Humanities and Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Engineering. From Statistics, previous recipients of the CTA Award were William Fithian and Stephen Reid in 2015 and Gourab Mukherjee in 2011.

Congratulations to all these amazing graduates:

Theodore W. Anderson Theory of Statistics Dissertation Award to Edgar Dobriban for his work on multiple testing and high-dimensional prediction, and in particular his thesis on computational tools for eigenvalue distributions in multivariate analysis and theory for testing for non-Gaussian data in principal components analysis

Jerome H. Friedman Applied Statistics Dissertation Award to Lucas Janson for his extraordinary work in high-dimensional signal-to-noise inference, high-dimensional variable selection, and especially model-free knockoffs

Probability Dissertation Award to Subhabrata Sen for making important and unexpected connections between combinatorial optimization in sparse graphs and the theory of mean field spin glasses

Centennial Teaching Assistant Awards to Ya Le and Jessica Hwang

Departmental Teaching Assistant Awards to Nima Hamidi, Feng Ruan and Kenneth Tay