PhD students place in ASA paper competition

Feldman and Gao win best paper awards, as Tan named runner-up.

Headshots of Joe Feldman, Yunan Gao and Xin Tan

Two doctoral students in statistics (STAT) at Rice University have won 2023 best paper awards, and a third named a runner-up, in a competition hosted by the American Statistical Association (ASA). 

In the ASA’s Bayesian Statistical Science category, Joe Feldman won for “Nonparametric Copula Models for Mixed Data with Informative Missingness.” Last year, Feldman won a best paper award in the ASA’s Health Policy Statistics category.

Also in the Bayesian Statistical Science category, Yunan Gao won for her paper, “Bayesian adaptive and interpretable functional regression for exposure profiles.”

Feldman’s and Gao’s papers were co-authored by their adviser at Rice, Daniel Kowal, Dobelman Family Assistant Professor in STAT.

Xin Tan was named runner-up in the Statistics in Imaging category for his paper “Bayesian structural determination by cryo-electron microscopy,” co-authored by his adviser, Meng Li, Noah Harding Assistant Professor of STAT. Xin acknowledged the support of a Ken Kennedy Institute graduate fellowship he won last year. 

The three students will formally receive their awards and cash prizes during the ASA’s Joint Statistical Meeting to be held Aug. 5-10  in Toronto.