News

STOR at University Research Week 2020

University Research Week 2020 took place October 19-23, 2020. STOR organized some short research talks in our classes to share with students some research activities happening in our department. Please find below the list of the talks: Mr. David Peery … Continued

Richard Smith named AAAS Fellow

Dr. Richard Smith has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of few statisticians to obtain this honor.  His nomination cited his work with the statistical analysis of extreme events and environmental applications, … Continued

Election article by STOR professors and graduate students

STOR graduate students Benjamin Leinwand and Puyao Ge, and professors Vidyadhar Kulkarni and Richard Smith teamed up recently to answer the following question: What is the smallest percentage of the popular vote a candidate can garner in a US presidential … Continued

Serhan Ziya’s research highlighted in Carolina Arts & Sciences Magazine

Professor Serhan Ziya is applying his expertise in operations research to help hospitals and emergency departments allocate limited resources most efficiently, showcasing the critical value of math and modeling in allocating needed health care resources.

Alumnus receives ASA award

Citing his “outstanding contribution” to small area estimation, the theory and practice of Bayesian statistics as well has his “superb teaching and mentoring of PhD students”, UNC alumnus Dr. Malay Ghosh of the University of Florida has been awarded the … Continued

STORies newsletter 2020

Enjoy reading the department first STORies newsletter. We would like the thank the contributors: Vladas Pipiras (Department Chair) Shankar Bhamidi (Graduate Program Director) Serhan Ziya (Undergraduate Program Director) Shayna Hill (Business Officer) Benjamin Leinwand (Graduate Student Liason) Yuzixuan Zhu (MS … Continued

Activities related to COVID-19

Professors Nilay Argon, Yufeng Liu and Serhan Ziya, together with graduate student Qian Cheng, have developed a tool for hospital and emergency department (ED) managers, physicians, and health care workers to quickly convert predictions of future COVID-19 patient arrivals into … Continued

Andrew Nobel promoted to Distinguished Professor

The Department is pleased to announce that faculty member Andrew B. Nobel has been appointed as the Robert Paul Ziff Distinguished Professor of Statistics and Operations Research, effective July 1, 2020.  Professor Nobel’s appointment recognizes his research achievements and collaborative activities. … Continued

Professors Bhamidi and Hannig named IMS fellows

The Institute of Mathematical Statistics has selected their cohort of new Fellows for 2020, and we have learned that Professors Bhamidi and Hannig will be on the list of honorees. Traditionally, fellows would be presented at the Presidential Address and … Continued

Congratulations 2020 Graduates

Please enjoy these messages from our Faculty & Staff.
Congratulations class of 2020! We are so proud of you!

Professor Argon quoted in Scientific American

  A recent article in Scientific American on triaging intensive care patients included an interview with Dr. Nilay Argon, whose joint work “Allocation of intensive care unit beds in periods of high demand” with Dr. Serhan Ziya and Dr. Huiyin … Continued

New courses for undergraduate students

The STOR Department is pleased to announce new courses coming soon (as early as Fall 2020) as well as some changes in some of the existing courses. Short descriptions of the new courses are provided below but here is a … Continued

Bin Yu to deliver Hotelling Lectures

The Hotelling Lectures are an annual event in the Department of Statistics & Operations Research at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.  They are presented to honor the memory of Professor Harold Hotelling, our first chairman. This year … Continued

North Carolina ASA Chapter recognizes Steve Marron

The North Carolina chapter of the American Statistical Association presented a Senior Statistician award to Dr. Steve Marron at the annual fall dinner on December 6, 2019. He and Alyson Wilson of NCSU were recognized for their “outstanding contributions to … Continued

Weibin Mo wins SLDS paper competition

PhD student Weibin Mo has been selected as a winner of the Statistical Learning and Data Science Student Paper Award competition.  In addition to a cash prize, he will have the opportunity to present his paper, “Learning Optimal Distributionally Robust … Continued

Graduate Student Website

Our amazing graduate students have created their own website which is designed to be a place to have all your questions about student life answered.  While it is still under construction, some sections are already full of information.  Questions about … Continued

STOR at the University Research Week

Two faculty members (Prof. Jan Hannig and Prof. Mario Giacomazzo), two Ph.D. students (Nhan Pham and Aleksandr Touzov), and one senior STAN student (Tiffany Tran) have presented their research and shared their thoughts and experience  to our undergraduate students during … Continued

Analyzing the qualifying standards for the Boston Marathon

On September 27, faculty member Richard Smith and STOR senior Spencer Siegel visited the Boston Athletic Association, organizers of the Boston Marathon, to consult about the qualifying standards that most runners must satisfy to enter the Boston Marathon. Richard previously … Continued

STOR undergraduates present at two sports analytics conferences

STOR seniors Spencer Siegel, Dan Barlow and James Bury have recently made presentations at two sports analytics conferences. On August 2, they traveled to Denver, CO, for the Rocky Mountain Symposium on Analytics in Sports, where they presented a talk … Continued

An interview of Kai Zhang on scientific reproducibility

Dr. Zhang was interviewed about his work on post-selection inference. “The problem today is that in many cases, researchers cannot replicate existing findings in the literature and they cannot produce the same conclusions. This is undermining the credibility of scientists … Continued

Kai Zhang receives NSF grant

Dr. Kai Zhang has recently been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation. “Binary Expansion Statistics: A Nonparametric Inference Framework for Big Data”. In the Big Data era, the large numbers of observations and variables pose unprecedented challenging problems … Continued

Shayna Hill on Search Committee

Our own Department Manager, Shayna Hill, will be serving as a member of the search committee for UNC-Chapel Hill’s new Chancellor.  As the chair of the Employee Forum, Shayna was included to represent the interests of UNC staff members across … Continued

STAN major internship on Chapel Hill’s sustainability initiative

Town Council intern, rising junior Daniel Bowen is making his adopted hometown of Chapel Hill a better place to live. Working alongside elected officials and staff at town hall, the public policy and statistics and analytics major is helping to … Continued

Jan Hannig receives NSF grant

Dr. Jan Hannig has recently been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation.  “Collaborative Research: Generalized Fiducial Inference in the Age of Data Science” is a three-year grant investigating foundations of statistical inference and its interplay with modern data … Continued

Commencement Ceremony

The Statistics and Operations Research Department held its annual Commencement Ceremony on Sunday, May 12, 2019 in the Genome Science Building.  A total of 164 Bachelor’s, 11 Master’s and 8 PhD degrees were awarded during the 2018-2019 academic year.  Dr. … Continued

Annual Talent Show

The Statistics and Operations Research department’s annual Talent Party was held at the home of Dr. Vidyadhar Kulkarni to the enjoyment of many.  Faculty, graduate students, family and friends shared food, music and dancing in an evening of fun and … Continued

UNC Team Tarheelytics takes second place in SOA challenge

Congratulations to the team of five UNC undergraduates who finished second among all competitors in the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Case Study Challenge for 2019! This means $500 for each team member, and $3000 for UNC. They completed a months-long project … Continued

An Interview with Nilay Argon

Endeavors, UNC’s digital research magazine, recently sat down with Professor Nilay Argon for their series “Women in Science Wednesday”.  Read the entire article here.

Congratulations new Phi Beta Kappa members

The Statistics and Operations Research department offers congratulations to our undergraduate majors who were recently initiated into Alpha of North Carolina Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.  The new members are: Taylor Burch Jackson Cabell Nidhi Murlidhar Fan Xu

Summer School Update

This year we are increasing our Summer School offerings to include STOR 320, Intro to Data Science.  This immensely popular class will be held during Summer Session II, and like all of our Summer School courses it will not be … Continued

Hotelling Lecturer Announced

The Hotelling Lectures are an annual event in the Department of Statistics & Operations Research honoring the memory of Professor Harold Hotelling, our first Department Chair.  This year we are honored to have Professor Yurii Nesterov deliver our two public … Continued

Zhengling Qi wins Student Paper Competition

Zhengling Qi, a PhD student in Statistics under advisor Yufeng Liu, has recently been selected as one of five winners of the 2019 Statistical Learning and Data Science Student Paper Competition.  Zhengling’s paper “Estimating Individualized Decision Rules with Tail Controls”, … Continued

Professor Kai Zhang addresses “reproducibility”

To help people understand some of the new challenges in statistics, Dr. Kai Zhang has recently published an article focusing on the reproducibility crisis for The Conversation.  Read the complete article here!

2018 Holiday Party

The Department of Statistics and Operations Research held its annual Holiday Party on December 6th.  Amid the food and fellowship, the following awards were presented to graduate students: Ph.D. students Michael Conroy, Haipeng Gao, Yang Yu and Zheqi Zhang received … Continued

New Phi Beta Kappa members

The Department of Statistics and Operations Research would like to congratulate undergraduate students Corwin Carr, Catherine Gill, Alexander Kan, Danny Ly, and Robert West on their recent initiation into Alpha of North Carolina Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Melody Zhu wins at Optimization Day

Melody Zhu, 4th year Ph.D. student in Operations Research, has received a poster prize for her talk “Sieve-SDP: a simple facial reduction algorithm to preprocess semidefinite programs” at the 2018 Princeton Optimization Day in September.  Congratulations Melody!

UNC to host Triangle Lectures in Combinatorics

The Triangle Lectures in Combinatorics is a series of combinatorial workshops held each semester on a Saturday in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, funded by the National Science Foundation.  The workshop this coming fall, the 16th installment of the Triangle Lectures … Continued

Welcome new faculty members

The Statistics and Operations Research Department would like to welcome our newest faculty members, Associate Professor Mariana Olvera-Cravioto, and Teaching Assistant Professors Mario Giacomazzo and Jeffrey McLean! Dr. Olvera-Cravioto received her bachelor’s degree is in Applied Mathematics from the “Instituto … Continued

Yifan Cui, Ph.D. (2018) receives Laplace Award

Congratulations to recent graduate Yifan Cui, recipient of the 2018 Laplace Award. The Laplace Award is given to the best student paper submitted to the Bayesian Statistical Science section at Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). Ten students are chosen as competition … Continued

New fund announced

The Department of Statistics and Operations Research recently received a generous gift from Dr. Gary Koch and Mrs. Carolyn Koch to establish the Raj Chandra Bose Graduate Student Travel Fund (through Gary G. Koch and Carolyn J. Koch and friends … Continued

Commencement 2018

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held its Commencement Ceremony on Sunday May 13, 2018.  Afterwards, the department held its own ceremony and reception to honor our graduates.  Department Chair Amarjit Budhiraja had some opening words before presenting … Continued

Department Commencement Speaker

Manoj Chari of SAS, Inc. will deliver the department’s commencement address this year. Manoj Chari graduated with a Ph.D. in Operations Research from UNC Chapel Hill in 1990. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of … Continued

Hotelling Speaker Announced

This year’s Hotelling Lectures will be presented by Steven N. Evans, Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. The first lecture will be “Some mathematical insights into aging and mortality” and the second, “The fundamental … Continued

New Phi Beta Kappa Inductees

The Alpha of North Carolina Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has announced that the following STOR students will be initiated into membership on March 21, 2018. Ryder Best Kevin Chen Nicholas Larsen John Mullan Eric Qian Ishan Shah Jillian Troftgruben … Continued

Call for applications

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL Department of Statistics and Operations Research TEACHING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR Applications are invited for a full-time fixed-term position at the Teaching Assistant Professor level, beginning July 2018. This position is part of a STEM initiative … Continued

Dean’s Graduate Fellows Announced

Ph.D. students Iain Carmichael (Statistics) and Yang Yu (INSTORE) are among 31 UNC graduate students selected as Dean’s Graduate Fellows in the College of Arts and Sciences for the 2018-19 academic year. Iain and Yang were selected for their teaching … Continued

Yifan Cui receives ASA award

The department congratulates Ph.D. student Yifan Cui, who has won an award for his paper from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Bayesian Statistical Science.  Ten winners were selected to receive a travel award to attend the Joint Statistical Meetings … Continued

Dr. Yufeng Liu awarded grant

Dr. Yufeng Liu has recently been awarded a $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, under the National Institute of Health.  “Unlocking complex co-expression network using graphical models” is a four-year grant investigating new machine learning … Continued

Carolina Grad Named Schwarzman Scholar

Congratulations to our 2015 MDS alum Min Yang on being selected for this prestigious program! Carolina Grad Named Schwarzman Scholar

Dr. J.S. Marron to be Visiting Lecturer

During the month of October Professor Steve Marron will be the Al-Kindi Distinguished Statistics Lecturer at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.  KAUST is the premier science university in Saudi Arabia and attracts leading international faculty … Continued