Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics (STAT) at Rice, has been awarded the 2020 Zellner Medal of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).
The medal recognizes ISBA members who have “rendered exceptional service to ISBA over an extended period of time, with a long-lasting impact.”
Vannucci joined the Rice faculty in 2007 after teaching STAT at Texas A&M for nine years. She earned her Ph.D. in STAT from the University of Florence, Italy in 1996. Vannucci served as Rice’s chair of STAT from 2014 to 2019 and holds an adjunct appointment in biostatistics at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Her research interests include Bayesian statistics, variable selection, graphical models, statistical computing and wavelets, with applications in genomics, neuroimaging and engineering.
Vannucci served as editor-in-chief of the ISBA journal Bayesian Analysis and as co-editor of Stat, an electronic journal of the International Statistical Institute. She is currently co-editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association--Theory and Methods.
She is an elected Fellow of ISBA, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Zellner Medal is named for Arnold Zellner, the American economist and statistician performed pioneering research in Bayesian analysis and econometric modeling.