Here are some items I’d like to highlight.
November 2024: I had the honor of being the 2024 Tamura Lilly lecturer for the Oberlin College Mathematics Department. I gave a talk entitled “A Cautious Survey Statistician’s Approach to Estimation in the Age of Big Data.”
August 2024: I started a new job! I am now the inaugural director of the Dominguez Center for Data Science at Bucknell University.
June 2024: Wesley Yung, Director General of the Modern Statistical Methods and Data Science Branch at Statistics Canada, and I led a short course on “Data Science Official Statistics” at the 7th International Conference on Establishment Statistics in Glasgow, Scotland. You can find the course materials here.
March 2024: Mally Shan won the Ruth and Silen M.D. Award for a health security dashboard that she originally created for my Stat 108 course. The award was given at the 23rd annual New England Science Symposium.
2024: I am serving as the 2024 Chair of the ASA Section on Statistics and Data Science Education. For section updates, check out my chair letter. If you’d like to get involved or have ideas for the section, please reach out!
November 2023: My research student, Dinan Hamdi Elsyad, won the “Best Video Presentation” award at the 2023 Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference for a project looking at a small area estimator for zero-inflation data, commonly experienced by FIA. This is joint work with Niels Korsgaard (Harvard), Kate Hu (Harvard), Grayson White (Michigan State), Josh Yamamoto (FIA), and George Gaines (FIA).
2023-2024: Some of my Stat 100 Teaching Fellows (Carly Chen, Eunah Jo, Alex Carlin, Hugo Hinze, Maria Fernanda Cifuentes, Alyssa Yap, and Nicolas Dominguez) and I led workshops on data visualization for Project Teach, a Harvard program focused on college and career awareness.
Oct 2023: I co-organized Data Adventure Day, which was held at the Harvard Science Center. We had around 150 high school students on-campus to learn about statistics and data science through hands-on activities and a college panel. The event was sponsored by the Department of Statistics, the Department of Biostatistics, and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
June 2023: Allan Rossman and I served as co-program chairs of the 2023 U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics. The 2023 theme was “Communicating with/about Data”.
May 2023: I was awarded the Alpha Iota Prize for Excellence in Teaching, which is awarded to Harvard faculty by student members of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
November 2022: Two of my research students, Asteria Chilambo and Jing Shang, won the “Best Video Presentation” award at the 2022 Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference for their summer work comparing two survey estimators! This was joint work with Raymond Czaplewski and George Gaines of the FIA.
Summer 2022/Summer 2023: I mentored 9 amazing undergraduate researchers on forestry data science research projects as part of a collaboration with the US Forest Inventory and Analysis Program. In Summer 2023, Grayson White helped me co-run the program as a visiting Research Fellow.
Summer 2022/Summer 2023: Emily Palmer and I ran a data book club. Sponsored by the Harvard Data Science Initiative, we read non-technical books related to data and society.
April 2022: I was so honored to be named a Fellow of the ASA “For excellence in the dissemination of statistical knowledge, notable contributions to the modernization of survey methods in official statistics, outstanding mentorship of undergraduates and junior researchers, and service to the profession.”
April 2022: I was a guest on the ASA Podcast Practical Significance to discuss ways to increase editorial diversity in ASA journals.
July 2021: My Reed students, Huaying Qiu and Lauren Lavelle, and I were guests on a two-part series on college rankings for Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History: Lord of the Rankings and Project Dillard.
June 2021: Allan Rossman and I served as co-program chairs of the 2021 U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics. The 2021 theme was “Expanding Opportunities”.
February 2021: Paul Roback and I wrote a guest post about giving oral exams for Allan Rossman’s Ask Good Questions blog.
August 2019: Brian Tarran, the editor of Significance Magazine, interviews me about my Voter ID work for the Voter ID Stats episode of the Stats and Stories podcast at JSM 2019.
Spring 2019: I was a winner of the Fiscal Year 2018 Director’s Award for Forest Inventory and Analysis Excellence and was “recognized for outstanding extensions of FIA by developing university course work and applications on inventory and monitoring using FIA data, information and online tools.”