Associate Professor

Status: Open

Dr. Le Bao earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is an associate professor and the chair of the undergraduate research program at the department of statistics, the key technical advisor for the UNAIDS Reference Group, and the project leader for the Diagnostics Modeling Consortium. His research focuses on using statistical models to address global health problems such as disease mapping, people at high risk of infectious diseases, and systematic literature review. http://www.personal.psu.edu/lub14/

Associate Professor

Status: Open

As part of this position, the student will examine an open question in the statistical modeling of animal tracking data. GPS tracking of individual animals is an important approach for understanding individual animal behavior. Missing data is very common in animal tracking data, and the most common approach is to take a two-stage approach and (1) first impute missing data and (2) then fit a statistical model to the imputed data. A more statistically rigorous approach would be to fit a statistical model that jointly estimates model parameters and the missing data locations. In this project, the student will learn Bayesian statistical methods, learn statistical models for animal movement, and use that knowledge to conduct a study that compares two-stage approaches with joint estimation approaches to modeling movement.

This project will be supervised by Dr. Ephraim Hanks, Associate Professor of Statistics, and Liz Eisenhauer, PhD student in Statistics. Desired qualifications include a course in Probabilty (STAT 414), solid computing experience in R (STAT 440 is desired, but not required), and other courses or experience in scientific data analysis (i.e, regression, data science, machine learning, applied mathematics). Research credit hours can be earned for this work. While funding is not guaranteed, we will work with interested students to apply for competitive funding and awards from the Eberly College of Science and the Statistics Department that may help pay for summer work.

Associate Research Professor

Status: Open

I received my Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Washington. Prior to joining Penn State, I worked at IHME, a global health institute. My research interests include but are not limited to social networks and population size estimation, with applications in social sciences and global health. As the director of the Statistical Consulting Center at Penn State, I collaborate with a broad range of scientists. Over the years of consulting and collaboration, I have maintained a keen curiosity about science and genuinely appreciate the importance of cross-disciplinary research. My research goal is to produce practically meaningful results that solve real scientific questions.

Research Professor, Director of CAUSE

Status: Open

Director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE: see www.causeweb.org) a national organization providing resources and professional development opportunities to instructors of college-level statistics.

Statistics Education Projects

• Evaluation of the use of songs and cartoons and Shiny apps in teaching statistical concepts in on-online or face-to-face courses.  Student(s) would be involved in developing apps and field testing them in courses as well as in data management and data analysis of the results of education experiments at Penn State (Stat or Data Science majors only, with a working knowledge of R, multiple positions).
• Evaluation of the use of Natural Language Processing for machine-assisted grading of open-ended assessment questions and for providing students with useful feedback in real-time. Student researcher would be involved in managing text-based assessment data from large classes and applying novel algorithms to test their value for educational purposes. Statistics or Data Science Modeling majors only, with excellent skills in Python programming.

Professor, Associate Dean for Graduate Education, Eberly College of Science

Status: Open

The greatest beauty and value of statistics stem from its role in collaborative cross-disciplinary research. Dr. Slavkovic’s primary research interest is in the area of data privacy and confidentiality, focusing on statistical disclosure limitation, statistical utility and their interplay with tools from computer sciences such as differential privacy, in the context of small and large scale surveys, health and genomic data, network data, and distributed data. Other related past and current research interests include evaluation methods for human performance in virtual environments, statistical data mining, application of statistics to social sciences, algebraic statistics, causal inference, and data fusion and record linkage. Slavkovic is a professor of Statistics, and Associate Dean for Graduate Education in Eberly College of Science at Penn State. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. 

Dr. Slavkovic (http://personal.psu.edu/abs12/) and Dr. Reimherr (http://www.personal.psu.edu/mlr36/) currently run a statistical data privacy group in the department of statistics that includes postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, discussing and developing tools and methods to support data usability and sharing, and validity of statistical modeling and inference, and thus the reproducibility, under constraints of data privacy.

Associate Teaching Professor

Status: Open

Statistical Uses and Applications in Sports

Primary research areas of interest are Sports and Education. Although projects are unfunded at this time, students have successfully researched their own personal topics of interest in these areas resulting in presentation or publication. Academic requirements depend on the robustness of the research question(s). Students who have what they believe is an interesting research idea should email me a brief statement that includes an overview of the research idea, hypotheses, possible data resources, statistics (or related) courses completed, programming languages with which they are familiar, GPA, and semester standing.

Associate Professor

Status: Open

Dr. Lingzhou Xue received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Minnesota in 2012. His research interests include high-dimensional statistics, statistical learning, optimization, econometrics, and statistical applications in biological science, environmental science, and social science.

For Summer 2021, Dr. Xue's research group has two openings for the NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates Program. The Summer 2021 REU program will focus on the computing and statistical foundations of data sciences for undergraduate students who are interested in pursuing graduate studies. We welcome applications from students who major in all areas of study, including computer science, data science, engineering, mathematics, and statistics.

Each participant will receive a stipend of $8,000 to cover all travel and living expenses. NSF requires an REU participant to be either a US citizen or a US permanent resident.