2025 Department Dissertation Awards

With sincere appreciation for all those involved in the nomination and review process, the Department of Statistics is proud to announce the following winners of our annual doctoral dissertation awards. Each hard-won distinction is accompanied by a prize of $1,000 and recognition by their peers during the department's diploma ceremony on June 15th. Please join us in congratulating these excellent scholars!

Theodore W. Anderson Theory of Statistics Dissertation Award

John Cherian – for his insightful and novel theoretical results in model-free predictive inference and in particular conformal inference with conditional guarantees, as well as methodological contributions to fairness auditing, large language models, and election forecasting.

Jerome H. Friedman Applied Statistics Dissertation Award

Zhaomeng Chen – for his development of "ghost knockoffs", a method that enables powerful, interpretable genetic discovery and causal variant prioritization using only summary statistics, allowing large-scale genomic studies to be combined without access to individual-level data.

Ingram Olkin Interdisciplinary Research Dissertation Award

Tim Morrison – for developing sparse, optimal designs for tie-breaker treatment allocation under convex constraints and extending them to nudge-based interventions with uncertain compliance, enabling efficient estimation of treatment effects in real-world settings like ICU triage.