Biography

I am a senior lecturer 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 am currently creating a new course, Stat 108: Introduction to Statistical Computing in R.

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. For summer 2023, I will be supervising 2-3 undergraduate research students on forestry data science projects.

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

• Survey statistics
• Machine/statistical learning
• Statistics and data science education