Biography
I am a Senior Lecturer and the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. Before that, I was an Associate Professor of Statistics at Reed College. I teach courses across the curriculum but most recently revamped Stat 100: Introduction to Statistics and Data Science (lecture slides here) and created a new course, Stat 108: Introduction to Statistical Computing in R in spring of 2023 (lecture slides here).
I am also a survey statistician who develops estimation
techniques that combine complex survey data with big data
sources. Whether it’s to estimate
official statistics, canopy cover or
occupational
statistics or to assess the impact
of voter ID laws, I enjoy creating methods to learn from
data. I am a big fan of the statistical software,
R
, and have written two R
packages: mase
for model-assisted survey estimation and pdxTrees
for exploring the trees of Portland, OR.
I love demystifying research for students and have had the opportunity to mentor many budding researchers. Most summers I run an undergraduate forestry data science program where undergraduate students tackle forestry data science research projects that are directly motivated by researchers at the US Forest Inventory and Analysis Program.
Education
Colorado State University | Fort Collins, CO
Ph.D. in Statistics | 2011
Masters in Statistics | 2008
St. Olaf College | Northfield, MN
B.A. in Mathematics | 2006
Interests
- Statistics and data science education
- Survey statistics
- Machine learning