Dr. Yuan Ke has recently accepted a role as Associate Editor for the Theory and Methods section of Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA). JASA is the flagship journal of the American Statistics Association and one of the very top research publications in statistics and data science.   Congratulations to Dr. Ke for being named to this prestigious position, which reflects his stature as one of the elite …

Congratulations to Dr. Ting Zhang who was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the project entitled, Collaborative Research: Change Point Testing and Estimation with Irregular Signals.   The project aims to provide a systematic solution to the difficult problem of change-point detection under irregular signals. Unlike the traditional setting in which signals before and after the change point are often…

Congratulations to Dr. RJ Liu for receiving funding from the Sarah H. Moss Fellowship program!  The Sarah H. Moss Fellowships provide funds for travel and related expenses for tenure-track faculty of the University of Georgia pursuing advanced scholarship, research, and study in institutions of higher learning abroad and in the United States. Dr. Liu will use her award to support collaboration with Dr. Fei Jiang at the University of…

Congratulations to Dr. Lynne Billard in whose honor the AI Institute of the University of New South Wales (Australia) is organizing a data science symposium on the topic of Statistical Analysis of Distributional Data. Details of the event can be found in the flyer linked here   The symposium will take place on Friday, August 21, 2026 at the UNSW campus in Sydney, Australia. Those interested in presenting at the event should submit their…

Forrest (Roy) Wilkes has been awarded a Summer 2026 CURO Research Award to pursue research in Bayesian Ranking and Optimization under the guidance of Dr. Abhyuday Mandal. His work focuses on developing statistical methods that improve the reliability of rankings derived from limited or noisy data by explicitly incorporating uncertainty through Bayesian modeling. In particular, he will construct a double stochastic rank matrix and develop an R…

Each year, the American Statistical Association (ASA) sponsors a two-day data science competition and "celebration of data" known as ASA DataFest.  Founded in 2011 at UCLA, this event has grown dramatically, expanding to many host institutions across the country each spring. While the UGA Department of Statistics has participated in ASA DataFest in the past, 2026 was the first time the department has hosted the event. And we went all in!…

In a recent American Statistical Association (ASA) election, Dr. Prince Allotey was elected Council of Sections Representative for the ASA Section on Statistics and Data Science Education. This post has a three-year term starting in 2027.  Dr. Allotey is very active in the ASA and other professional organizations in our discipline. In addition to his newly elected position as ASA Council of Sections Representative, he is a member…

On May 7, the Department of Statistics hosted its annual Convocation event in Sanford Hall. This year separate ceremonies were held for undergraduates receiving their BS in either statistics or data science (or, in one student's case, both!) and graduate students receiving master's or PhD degrees in one of these disciplines.         The undergraduate ceremony featured speeches by two graduating seniors, Ms. Aarushi Modi, a…

UGA Statistics Assistant Professor, Dr.  RJ Liu, was recently informed that her proposal, AI-Driven Multimodal Feature Engineering for Personalized Biomedical System Design, has been funded under the NSF's highly prestigious CAREER grant program. The project will span five years with a total award amount of $546,167. This is a fantastic achievement that recognizes and invests in Dr. Liu's outstanding ongoing program of research and…

Angelina Garcia, a junior from Bethlehem, GA working on her BS in Statistics and MS in Statistics in the UGA Double Dawg program, has been selected to participate in the McNair Scholars Program. The goal of the McNair Scholars Program is to increase the number of underrepresented students in doctoral programs. In Summer 2026, Angelina will be working with Department of Statistics faculty members Dr. Gauri Datta and Dr. Abhyuday Mandal…