The Department of Statistics Colloquia takes place on Mondays from 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm CST in Maxfield Hall Room 251 - except on holidays, during university breaks, or otherwise noted. For details on each colloquium and speaker, visit the Rice University events calendar.
Spring 2024
January 17 Wednesday - Special Seminar
Dr. Guanyang Wang
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics
Rutgers University
"The Many Facets of Monte Carlo Methods: From Sampling Algorithms to Unbiased Estimators"
January 22
Dr. Chris Harshaw
Postdoctoral Fellow, Foundations of Science
UC Berkeley and MIT (joint)
"Algorithm Design for Randomized Experiments"
January 29
Sifan Liu
PhD student, Stanford University
" An Exact Sampler for Inference after Polyhedral Selection"
February 5 - Thompson Lecture Series
Dr. Alicia Carriquiry
Distinguished Professor and President's Chair
Director of the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence
Iowa State University
"Statistics and the Fair Administration of Justice"
February 7 Wednesday - Special Seminar
Dr. Isa Marques
Lecturer, School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Glasgow, Scotland
"Navigating Spatial Confounding: Understanding causes and proposing mitigating approaches"
February 12
Dr. Maoran Xu
Postdoctoral Associate Researcher
Department of Statistics
Duke University
"Factor models as identifiable and interpretable generative models"
February 14 Wednesday - Special Seminar
Dr. Yang Chen
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"Video Imputation and Prediction Methods with Applications in Space Weather"
February 19 - no seminar
February 21 Wednesday - Special Seminar
Dr. Arkajyoti Saha
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Statistics
University of Washington
"Inference for machine learning under dependence"
February 26 - No Seminar
March 4
Dr. Rui Tuo
Assistant Professor
Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
Texas A&M University
"Some recent advances in statistical asymptotic theory via RKHS approximations"
March 11 - Spring break, no seminar
March 18
Dr. Thanh Le Nhat Dang
Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Mathematics
Florida State University
"Some recent applications of multivariate approximation via Stein's method to computational statistics"
March 25
Dr. Rituparna Sen
Visiting Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara
Associate Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, India
"Bayesian Testing of Granger Causality in Functional Time Series"
April 1
Dr. Dehan Kong
Associate Professor
Department of Statistical Sciences
University of Toronto
"Causal Inference on Distribution Functions"
April 8 - Solar Eclipse Day, no seminar
April 15
Dr. Gal Mishne
Assistant Professor, Halicioglu Data Science Institute (HDSI)
UC San Diego
"Learning the dynamics of functional connectivity and behavior"
August 22 - Eubank Lecture
"Real Estate Investment in a Changing Market"
- Fall 2023
-
August 28
Dr. Xiongxhi Chen
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Washington State UniversitySeptember 4 - Labor Day, no seminar
September 11
Dr. Scott Holan
Professor, Department of Statistics
University of Missouri
"Computationally Efficient Bayesian Unit-level Models for Non-Gaussian Data Under Informative Sampling"September 18
Dr. Yang Ni
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
Texas A&M University
"Causal Discovery from Multivariate Functional Data"September 25 - CMOR/STAT/MATH Special Seminar in McMurtry Auditorium in Duncan Hall
Dr. Mariel Vazquez
Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
University of California - Davis
"Understanding viruses using topology and data science"October 2
Dr. Bo Li
Professor, and Chair, Department of Statistics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Multiple Testing for Spatial Extreme with Application to Climate Model Evaluation"October 9 - midterms, no seminar
October 16
Dr. Yize Zhao
Associate Professor of Biostatistics
Yale School of Public Health
"Bayesian Imaging genetics modeling for brain structural connectivity "October 23
Dr. Eric Chi
Associate Professor, STAT
Rice University
"Proximal MCMC for Approximate Bayesian Inference of Constrained and Regularized Estimation"October 30
Dr. Kuldeep Kumar
Professor of Data Analytics
Bond University - Australia
"Some Issues in Classification Problems with Application in Finance"November 6
Dr. Peter Song
Professor, Department of "BIostatistics
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
"Supervised Homogeneity Pursuit and Uncertainty Quantification via Mixed Integer Optimization"November 13
Dr. James Harmon
Data Scientist, Liberty Mutual Insurance
"Thinking Differently"November 20 - Thanksgiving week, no seminar
November 27
Dr. Didong Li
Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
"A Journey to Derivatives: From Historical Foundations to Spatial Data Frontiers"
- Spring 2023
-
January 23
Rong Tang
PhD student, graduation May 2023
Department of Statistics
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Distribution Estimation Using Generative Models under Adversarial Losses"January 30 - Thompson Lecture Series
Dr. Francesca Dominici
Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, Harvard University
Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
"Data Science To Address The Health Impacts Of Climate Change"February 6
Dr. Hengrui Luo
Postdoctoral Fellow, Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
"Online nonparametric surrogate models for scientific computation"
February 13 - CANCELLED
Dr. Anqi Zhao
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics and Data Science
National University of Singapore
"To Adjust or not to Adjust? Estimating the Average Treatment Effect in Randomized Experiments with Missing Covariates"February 20
Dr. Salman Asif
Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, Riverside
"Adversarial Attacks for Blackbox Models"February 24 Friday - 11am in MXF 252
Dr. Jun Yang
Florence Nightingale Bicentennial Fellow and Tutor in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning
Department of Statistics, University of Oxford
"Stereographic Markov chain Monte Carlo"February 27
Dr. Edward Jimenez
Principal Scientist and Engineer
Sandia National Laboratories
"Lessons learned from Developing a High-Energy Hyperspectral Computed Tomography system for Industrial and Security based Applications"March 6
Dr. Tianxi Li
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
University of Virginia
"Subspace regression and its inference on noisy network-linked data"March 13 - no seminar, Spring Break
March 20
Dr. Shiqian Ma
Associate Professor, Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research
Rice University
"An Overview of ADMM: Old and New"March 27 - Black History/Heritage Month
Dr. Rebecca Hubbard
Professor, Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
"Advancing timely and valid medical research with real-world data and medical science"April 3
Dr. Cesar Uribe
Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rice University
"Decentralized Parametric Inference: Non-asymptotic bounds, time-varying directed networks, uncertain models, and communication efficiency"April 10
Dr. Julia Adela Palacios
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Data Science
Stanford University
"Distance-based summaries and modeling of evolutionary trees"April 17
Dr. Scott Powers
Department of Sport Management (starting Fall 2023), Rice University
Former Assistant General Manager, Houston Astros
"Nuclear penalized multinomial regression with an application to predicting at bat outcomes in baseball"
- Fall 2022
-
September 12
Dr. Barry Nussbaum
Adjunct Professor, University of Maryland Baltimore County
Chief Statistician, Environmental Protection Agency (ret.)
Former President, American Statistical Association
"It’s Not What We Said, It’s Not What They Heard, It’s What They Say They Heard "September 19
Dr. Arlei Silva
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science
Rice University
"Link Prediction with Autocovariance"September 26 - tbd
October 3 - tbd
October 10 - midterms, no seminar
October 17
Dr. Aaron Molstad
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
University of Florida
"Modern approaches to multivariate categorical response regression"October 24
Dr. Roger Peng
Professor, Department of Statistics
The University of Texas - Austin
"Systematic Approaches to Diagnosing Data Analytic Problems"October 31 - STAT Colloquia seminar moved to November 2
University Special Event
Hispanic/Lantinx Contributions to Mathematics
Special Guest: Dr. Rodrigo Banuelos
Purdue University
November 2 - Wednesday
Dr. Lexin Li
Professor, School of Public Health
University of California - Berkeley
"Statistical Neuroimaging Analysis: An Overview"November 7
Dr. Richard Hahn
Associate Professor, School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
Arizona State University
"Feature selection for causal inference"November 14
Dr. Joe Guinness
Associate Professor, Department of Statistics and Data Science
Cornell University
"Gaussian Process Computing with Vecchia's Approximation and GpGp R Package"November 21 - no seminar, Thanksgiving week
November 28
Dr. Boaz Nadler
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Weizmann Institute of Science
"The Trimmed Lasso: Sparse Recovery Guarantees And Practical Optimization"
- Spring 2022
-
January 24 - Zoom only
Dr. Wenyi Wang
Professor, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
MD Anderson Cancer Center
WATCH "Cancer risk modeling for deleterious mutations in TP53 using a multi-center consortium"January 31 - Thompson Lecture Series in McMurtry Auditorium
Dr. Adrian Raftery
Boeing International Professor of Statistics & Sociology
Founding Director, Center of Statistics and Social Sciences
University of Washington in Seattle
WATCH "Probabilistic Sea-Ice Forecasting"February 4 (Friday) - Special Seminar - Zoom only
Dr. Frederi Viens
Professor, Department of Statistics and Probability
Interim Director: Actuarial Science Program
Adjunct Director: Center for Statistical Training and Consulting
Michigan State University
WATCH "Convergence results for Yule's "nonsense correlation" using stochastic analysis"
February 7
Alejandra Quintos
Ph.D. Candidate and Fulbright Fellow
Department of Statistics
Columbia University
WATCH "Dependent Stopping Times and an Application to Credit Risk Theory"February 14 -21 - no seminars
February 28
Dr. Christopher Tunnell
Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rice University
WATCH "How domain knowledge and symmetries are used in data-intensive astroparticle physics"March 7
Dr. David Scott
Emeritus Professor, Department of Statistics
Rice University
WATCH "History of Maths/Stats at Rice and A Minimum Distance Approach to Finding Clusters"March 14 - No seminar, Spring Break
March 21
Dr. Rajarshi Guhaniyogi
Associate Professor, Department of Statistics
Texas A&M University
WATCH "Bayesian High-dimensional Regressions with Tensors and Distributed Computation with Space-time Data"March 28 - ENAR 2022 in Houston
April 4
Dr. Richard De Veaux
Chair & C. Carlisle and Margaret Tippit Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Williams College
WATCH "Age and Human Performance in Running and Swimming"April 11
Dr. Jian Kang
Professor, School of Public Health
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
WATCH "Bayesian Inferences on Neural Activity in EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface"April 18
Dr. Brad Price
Assistant Professor
John Chambers College of Business and Economics
West Virginia University
WATCH "On the use of Minimum Penalties in Multivariate Regression"April 25 - Eubank Conference
- Fall 2021
-
August 30 - remote
Dr. Hua Zhou, Professor
Department of Biostatistics
UCLA Fielding School of Public Health
WATCH "Inferring Within-Subject Variances From Intensive Longitudinal Data"September 13 - starts at 4:30
Dr. Giovanni Motta, Visiting Professor
Department of Statistics
Texas A&M University
"Estimation for Smooth Eigenvectors of Matrix-Valued Functions"September 20 - no seminar
September 27
Dr. Mikyoung Jun
ConocoPhillips Data Science Professor
Department of Mathematics
University of Houston
WATCH "On modeling of multivariate spatio-temporal point patterns"October 4
Dr. Guha Balakrishnan, Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rice University
WATCH "Towards causal bias benchmarking of vision systems using generative image models"October 15-16
NBER-NSF Time Series ConferenceOctober 18
Dr. Alex Renwick, Postdoctoral Associate
Medicine, Epidemiology and Population Sciences
Baylor College of Medicine
WATCH "Network Neighborhood Regression: Conditional Association Testing in High Dimension through a Marriage of Machine Learning and Statistics"October 25
Dr. Suprateek Kundu, Associate Professor
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
WATCH "Non-parametric Bayesian Modeling for Population of Vector Autoregressions"November 1
Dr. Scott Bruce, Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics
Texas A&M University
WATCH "Conditional adaptive Bayesian spectral analysis of replicated multivariate time series"
November 8
Dr. Wayne Winston, Emeritus Professor
Department of Operations and Decision Technologies
Indiana University - Bloomington
WATCH "Doing Statistics in Excel"
November 15 - remote
Dr. Michael Mahoney, Associate Professor
Department of of Statistics
University of California - Berkeley
WATCH "Toward combining principled scientific models and principled machine learning models"November 29
Dr. Marek Kimmel, Professor
Department of Statistics
Rice University
WATCH "Modeling risk of lung cancer: Coordination of molecular events and growth characteristics of tumors"
- Spring 2021
-
February 1 - seminar starts at 9:00 am CST
Dr. Beniamino Hadj-Amar, Postdoc
Department of Statistics
Rice University
WATCH "Bayesian Analysis of Nonstationary Periodic Time Series"February 8 - seminar starts at 9:00 am CST
Dr. Antonio Canale, Assistant Professor
Department of Statistical Sciences
University of Padua, Italy
WATCH "Escaping the curse of dimensionality in Bayesian model based clustering"February 15 - postponed to later date, tbd
Dr. Frederi Viens, Professor
Department of Statistics and Probability
February 22
Dr. Garvesh Raskutti, Associate Professor
Department of Statistics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
WATCH "Sketching meets tensor estimation: Recent developments in large-scale low-rank tensor problems"
March 3, Wednesday 11 am - rescheduled
Dr. Frederi Viens, Professor
Department of Statistics and Probability
Director, Actuarial Science Program
Adjunct Director, Center for Statistical Training and Consulting
Michigan State University
WATCH "Gaussian and second-chaos time series: quantitative normal asymptotics for parameter estimation, and applications"March 8
Dr. Lorin Crawford, Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics, Brown University
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research New England
WATCH "Statistical Frameworks for Mapping 3D Shape Variation onto Genotypic and Phenotypic Variation"
March 15
Dr. Antonio Linero, Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics and Data Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
WATCH "On Theory and Practice for Bayesian Tree Ensembles"
March 22
Dr. Stephen G. Walker, Professor
Department of Mathematics, Department of Statistics and Data Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
WATCH "Bayesian Uncertainty"March 29
Dr. Mark Glickman, Senior Lecturer
Department of Statistics and Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research
WATCH "Data Tripper: Authorship Attribution Analysis of Lennon-McCartney Songs"
April 5
Dr. Peng Wei, Associate Professor
Department of Biostatistics
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
WATCH "Mixture model approaches to multi-omics data integration"
April 12
Dr. Loren Hopkins, Professor in the Practice
Department of Statistics, Rice University
Chief Environmental Science Officer, City of Houston Health Department
WATCH "The Critical Role of Science and Statistics in Managing a Pandemic "
April 19
Dr. Chad Shaw, Professor
Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine (STaR) Center
Baylor College of Medicine
WATCH "Ontological Surprise"
- Fall 2020
-
September 21
Dr. Peter Mueller, Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science
Department of Mathematics and Department of Statistics & Data Science
University of Texas—Austin
WATCH: "Dependent Mixtures: Modeling Cell Lineage"September 28
Dr. Ron Wasserstein, Executive Director
American Statistical Association
WATCH: "Moving to a World Beyond P<0.05"October 5
Dr. Tanya Garcia, Associate Professor
Department of Biostatistics
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
WATCH: "Dynamic landmark prediction for mixture data"October 12
Dr. Michelle Torres, Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Rice University
WATCH: "The Bag of Visual Words: Using Computer Vision to Understand Visual Frames and Political Communication"October 19
Dr. Dustin Pluta, Visiting Scholar
Department of Statistics
Rice University
WATCH: "Latent Factor Gaussian Process Model for the Analysis of Dynamic Functional Connectivity in LFP Data"October 26 - seminar starts at 9:00 am CST
Dr. Daniele Durante, Assistant Professor
Department of Decision Sciences
Universita Bocconi
WATCH: "Scalable and Accurate Variational Bayes for High-Dimensional Binary Regression Models"November 2
Dr. Marek Kimmel, Professor
Department of Statistics
Rice University
"Coalescence, the problem of species and models of evolution of coronavirus genomes"November 9
Dr. Simon Tavare, Professor
Department of Systems Biology
Director, Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics
Columbia University
"On Fisher's measure of variability in repeated samples"November 16 - postponed to April 19, 2021
Dr. Chad Shaw, Professor
Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine (STaR) Center
Baylor College of MedicineNovember 30 - postponed to March 15, 2021
Dr. Antonio Linero, Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics and Data Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
"On Theory and Practice for Bayesian Tree Ensembles"
- Spring 2020
-
January 27
Dr. Jianqing Fan, Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor in Finance
Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University
"Communication-Efficient Accurate Statistical Estimation"February 3
Dr. Bin Yu, Professor of Statistics
Department of Statistics, University of California-Berkeley
"Veridical Data Science"February 10
Dr. Justin Silver, Manager of Data Science & AI Specialist and Dr. Yan Xu, Senior Data Scientist
PROS Holdings, Inc.
"Forecasting Applications in Industry: When Theory Meets Reality"February 17
Dr. Fabrizio Ruggeri, Research Director
Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technology of the Italian National Research Council
"New Classes of Priors based on Stochastic Orders: Theory and Applications in Reliability"February 24
Dr. Anuj Srivastava, Professor and Distinguished Research Professor
Department of Statistics, Florida State University
"Functional and Shape Data Analysis"March 2
Dr. Peter Bickel
Professor Emeritus and Professor in the Graduate School
Department of Statistics, University of California-Berkeley
"Some basic issues in network models and fitting"March 30 - CANCELLED
Dr. Tanya Garcia, Associate Professor
Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University - College Station
"Dynamic landmark prediction for mixture data"April 6 - CANCELLED
Dr. Antonio Linero, Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics and Data Science, University of Texas - Austin
"On Theory and Practice for Bayesian Tree Ensembles"April 13 - McMurtry Auditorium - CANCELLED
Dr. Mark Glickman, Senior Lecturer
Department of Statistics and Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, Harvard University
"Data Tripper: Authorship Attribution Analysis of Lennon-McCartney Songs"April 20 - CANCELLED
Dr. Richard Hahn, Associate Professor of Statistics
School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, Arizona State University - Fall 2019
-
September 9
Dr. Don H. Johnson
J.S. Abercrombie Professor Emeritus
Title: Signal Processing and Technical Examinations of Paintings
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Rice UniversitySeptember 16
Dr. Christine B. Peterson
Assistant Professor
Title: Flexible and informative clustering of microbiome data
Department of Biostatistics, Divison of Basic Science Research, MD Anderson Cancer CenterSeptember 23
Dr. Jeffrey Scargle
Research Astrophysicist
Title: Adventures in Astronomical Time Series Analysis
Planetary System Branch, Astrobiology and Space Science Division, NASA Ames Research Center, CaliforniaOctober 1 - Thompson Lecture Series
Dr. Mark Hansen
Professor of Journalism
Director, David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Columbia University
"Simulation: A plot twist"October 7
Dr. Quan Zhou
Assistant Professor
Title: The distribution of Yule's nonsense correlation
Texas A&M UniversityOctober 21
Dr. Heping Zhang
Susan Dwight Bliss Professor
Title: Back to the Basics: Residuals and Diagnostics for Generalized Linear Models
Yale University School of Public HealthOctober 29
Dr. Eric Laber
Professor of Statistics
Director, Research Translation and Engagement
Title: Sample size considerations for precision medicine
North Carolina State UniversityNovember 4
Dr. Catherine Calder
Department Chair and Professor
Title: The Geometry of Continuous Latent Space Models for Network Data
Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, University of Texas - AustinNovember 18
Dr. Marek Kimmel
Professor and Associate Chair
Title: Statistical inference for the evolutionary history of cancer genomes
Department of Statistics, Rice UniversityDecember 2
Dr. Surya Tokdar
Associate Professor
Title: The Joint Quantile Regression under Spatial Dependency
Department of Statistical Science, Duke University
- Spring 2019
-
January 24
Dr. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel
Associate Professor of the Practice & Director of Undergraduate Studies
Title: Let them eat cake (first)!
Department of Statistical Science, Duke UniversityFebruary 4
Dr. Dennis Sun
Assistant Professor
Departments of Statistics and Computer Science, Cal Poly, San Luis ObispoFebruary 11
Dr. Stephanie Hicks
Assistant Professor
Title: Applications of Latent Variables in Identifying Systematic Errors in Genomics
Bloomberg School of Public Health and Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Johns Hopkins UniversityFebruary 18
Dr. Eric Laber
Associate Professor
Title: Interpretable Decision Rules for Clinical Decision Support
Statistics Department, NC State UniversityFebruary 25
Dr. Jeff Goldsmith
Associate Professor
Title: Modeling motor learning using heteroskedastic functional principal components analysis
Department of Biostatistics, Columbia University Mailman School of Public HealthMarch 18
Dr. Lucas Janson, Assistant Professor
Title: New Results on Knockoffs for FDR-Controlled High-Dimensional Variable Selection
Department of Statistics, Harvard UniversityMarch 25
Dr. Peiyong "Annie" Qu
Director of Consulting, Professor
Title: Individualized Multilayer Tensor Learning with An Application in Imaging Analysis
Department of Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignApril 1
Dr. John Nolan, Professor
Title: A primer on heavy tailed stable distributions
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, American UniversityApril 8
Dr. Richard Davis, Howard Levene Professor and Department Chair
Title: The Use of Shape Constraints for Modeling Time Series of Counts
Department of Statistics, Columbia UniversityApril 15
Dr. James Fill
Professor & Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies
Title: Multivariate Pareto Records
Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Johns Hopkins Whiting School of EngineeringApril 22
Dr. Pete Mohanty
Science, Engineering & Education Fellow and Lecturer
Title: Advances in Kernel-Regularized Least Squares, with Applications to Political Science
Department of Statistics, Stanford University