Graduate Students

• I consider myself to be unusually fortunate to have the opportunities to work with so many fantastic individuals. It gives me utmost pleasure seeing them doing extremely well in their careers, and lives in general.

Completed Ph.D. Theses

• Eric Gilleland (Ph.D., 2005; co-supervision with Douglas Nychka): Statistical Models for Quantifying the Spatial Distribution of Seasonally derived Ozone Standards; now a Project Scientist at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
• Curtis Storlie (Ph.D., 2005; co-supervision with Jan Hannig): Tracking of Multiple Merging and Splitting Targets with Application to Convective Systems; now an Associate Professor at Mayo Clinic
• Kelly McConville (Ph.D., 2011; co-supervision with Jay Breidt): Improved Estimation for Complex Surveys Using Modern Regression Techniques; now a Senior Lecturer at Harvard University
• Ming Zhong (Ph.D., 2012; co-supervision with Alexander Aue): Break Point Estimation and Variable Selection in Quantile Regressions; now a Data Scientist at Microsoft
• Raymond K. W. Wong (Ph.D., 2014): On some Complex and Massive Data Problems; now an Associate Professor at Texas A & M University
• Randy C. S. Lai (Ph.D., 2015): Generalized Fiducial Inference and its applications to High Dimensional and Massive Data Problems; now a Data Scientist at Google Research
• Rex C. Y. Cheung (Ph.D., 2017; co-supervision with Alexander Aue): Statistical Machine Learning Applications in Time Series, Network, and Partition-wise Models; now an Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at San Francisco State University
• Minjie Fan (Ph.D., 2017; co-supervision with Debashis Paul): Modeling Vectorial and Non-Gaussian Random Fields on a Sphere; now a Quantitative Analyst at Google Research
• Qi Gao (Ph.D., 2017): Some Contributions to Statistical Signal Processing and Machine Learning; now a Data Scientist at Faire
• Justin Wang (Ph.D., 2018): Statistical Machine Learning Approaches in Photographic and Social Science Applications; now a Research Scientist at Amazon
• Chunzhe Zhang (Ph.D., 2018): Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis in Statistical Machine Learning; now a Data Scientist at LinkedIn
• Suofei Wu (Ph.D., 2019): Some Contributions to Random Forests and High-dimensional Principal Component Regression; now a Data Scientist at Adobe
• Seung Yong Hwang (Ph.D., 2020; co-supervision with Jie Peng): Nonlinear Statistical Methods and Applications to Biomedical Data; now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University
• Amy Taeyen Kim (Ph.D., 2020; co-supervision with Debashis Paul): Modeling Data Observed on Spheres and Graphs; now a Statistics Unit-18 Lecturer at the University of California, Davis
• Yao Li (Ph.D., 2020; co-supervision with Cho-Jui Hsieh): On Robustness and Efficiency of Machine Learning Systems; now an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Franco Liang (Ph.D., 2020; co-supervision with Cho-Jui Hsieh): On Accuracy, Efficiency and Fairness in Classification; now a Data Scientist at LinkedIn
• Yi Su (Ph.D., 2020): Statistical Inference for Network Data Problems; now a Data Scientist at LinkedIn
• Tongyi Tang (Ph.D., 2021; co-supervision with Debashis Paul): Multiscale Statistical Analysis of Vector Fields on a Sphere with Applications to Geophysics; now a Data Scientist at Facebook
• Zhenyu Wei (Ph.D., 2021): Some Contributions to High-dimensional Statistical Machine Learning; now a Data Scientist at Facebook
• Cong Xu (Ph.D., 2021): Change Point Detection for Image, Graph and Network Data; now a Data Scientist at Waymo

Completed Master Theses

• Stephan D. Whitaker (Master, 2003): A Comparison of Estimation Techniques for Mixtures of Normal Densities
• Andrea Nibbe (Master, 2004): Improved Nonparametric Radial Basis Function Regression using Genetic Algorithms and Model Combination
• Troy Orwan (Master, 2004): Simultaneous Variable Selection and Outlier Identification using the Minimum Description Length Principle
• Courtney A. Sykes (Master, 2006; co-supervision with Hari Iyer): Bathymetry: Estimation of Coastal Water Depths and Expression of Uncertainty using the NIST Standardized Approach
• Stuart Kilzer (Master, 2008): Estimating the Position of a Mobile using Least Squares and Smoothing Techniques

In Progress

• Jue Wang (Ph.D.)
• Xiawei Wang (Ph.D., co-supervision with James Sharpnack)
• Wancheng Cai (Ph.D.)
• Wei Du (Ph.D.)
• Yi Han (Ph.D.)
• Yishan Huang (Ph.D., co-supervision with Alexander Aue)
• Yue Kang (Ph.D., co-supervision with Cho-Jui Hsieh)