2022 Department Dissertation Awards

The Statistics Department is honored to announce a full lineup of doctoral dissertation awards this year. Each hard-won distinction is accompanied by a prize of $1,000 and recipients will be presented with their certificates during our diploma ceremony on June 12th. Hearty congratulations are offered to these outstanding scholars for contributions to their fields.

Probability Theory Dissertation Award

Sky Cao — for deep contributions to lattice gauge theories and Yang–Mills theory, including in particular the proof of mass gap in lattice gauge theories with finite gauge groups, the existence of solutions to the Yang–Mills heat equation with distributional initial data, and the construction of a state space for 3D Euclidean Yang–Mills theories.

Theodore W. Anderson Theory of Statistics Dissertation Award

Shuangning Li — for contributions to the asymptotic study and understanding of causal inference under interference as well as your contributions to discovery of causal structure by searching for consistent causal effects across conditions and rigorous control of FDR for the discovered effects.

Jerome H. Friedman Applied Statistics Dissertation Award

Nikos Ignatiadis — for developing methodology that uses side information for increased power in multiple testing problems and for developing approaches to inference in empirical Bayes problems.

Ingram Olkin Interdisciplinary Research Dissertation Award

Swarnadip Ghosh — for contributions to frequentist estimation and Bayesian inference in crossed random effects models providing scalable algorithms and understanding the relationships between the two approaches.