Two new faculty members, including one who is tenure-track, have joined the Department of Statistics (STAT) at Rice University.
They are among this year’s 21 new faculty hires in the George R. Brown School of Engineering. This latest group of researchers and teachers further establishes the school’s prominence in its key research areas: health and well-being, energy and sustainability, resilient and adaptive communities, advanced materials, and future computing.
The new members of the STAT faculty are:
Hengrui Luo, assistant professor: Luo earned his Ph.D. in statistics from Ohio State University in 2020, and for two years worked as a postdoctoral fellow in applied mathematics and computational research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. His research focuses on Bayesian methodology, topological and geometrical data analysis, and high-dimensional probability. He joined the Rice faculty on Aug. 16.
Andrew Womack, lecturer: He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Washington University in 2011 and served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida and the University of Southern California. From 2014 to 2022 he was an assistant professor of STAT at Indiana University. Working as a consulting statistician, Womack’s most recent research has been on aphasia modeling in stroke patients with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, the Veterans Health Foundation and Portland State University. He joined the Rice faculty on July 1.