In this issue
I was born in Beijing in northern China, but went to Shanghai in southern China for a college degree in Fudan University. I became interested in probability and statistics, as probability provides a rigorous, mathematical framework for modeling stochasticity, whereas statistics enables one to sort through large amounts of data to make discoveries. During my PhD in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, I was also in the Statistical Genetics program and was fascinated by the technological advances in modern biology and genomics, which began to produce what we now call ‘big data’. After PhD I did my first postdoc at the University of Cambridge, working with fly biologists and developing Bayesian clustering methods and bioinformatic pipelines for microarray gene expression and protein binding data. I then moved to the University (continued on page 7)
Welcome to our latest edition of the Statistics Newsletter! There are many exciting things happening in the department, including new faculty, promotions for faculty, new research initiatives, and reports on current and future programs. Our newest faculty member, Dr. Audrey Fu, started this September. Dr. Fu was hired a year ago in the summer of 2014 from postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, but she then was awarded a prestigious NIH Pathway to Independence Award and NIH/NHGRI, 2014 that allowed her to extend her postdoctoral work for another year at Chicago and Stanford. We are very excited that she is now here in Moscow with us! We also have two new affiliate faculty members: Dr. Chris Remien and Dr. Berna Devezer. Dr. Remien is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department, and Dr. Devezer is an Assistant Professor in the College of Business. In recent promotion news, Dr. Michelle Wiest was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor while Dr. Tim Johnson was promoted to Full Professor.
Letter from the Chair
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Interview with Dr. Fu
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Our Faculty
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Everson Fellowship
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Our Graduate Students
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Consulting Center
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Student Assist. Center
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Alumni News
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Internships
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Several members of the department have key roles in a new $10.6 million NIH grant with Dr. Holly Wichman of the Biological Sciences department as Principal Investigator. Drs. Erkan Buzbas, Audrey Fu, Chris Remien, and Michelle Wiest all play important roles in this project. This award has created a new center, the Center for Modeling Complex Interactions (CMCI), which will facilitate interdisciplinary research across the UI campus. One new development with this grant is that the Statistical Consulting Center (SCC) will move from Brink Hall into the new IRIC building in Fall 2016 when it is finished, to coordinate services to aid interdisciplinary researchers. Our online version of the MS degree in Statistics, which has only been available for a few years, has already had 4 graduates and now has 13 students. Combined with our 16 MS Statistics students in residence at Moscow, our Master's program is bigger than it has ever been. A new initiative that is underway is the development of an Analytics Certificate, which will be available both on the Moscow campus and via distance. Drs. Stephen Lee, Michelle Wiest, and I have worked with (continued on page 2) (continued from page 1)
(Continued from page 1) Dr. Norm Pendegraft from the College of Business to create two new courses that will be part of the certificate. A new Analytics course is being taught by Dr. Lee, and Dr. Pendegraft is developing a database course for big data as well. The certificate will consist of these two courses in addition to two other courses. The final details of the certificate will be finalized this year. One last thing I want to bring to your attention is our department LinkedIn group. We already have about 100 members in the group, which includes alumni, faculty, staff, and friends. If you are not already a LinkedIn member, it is free to join. Once you are a LinkedIn member, you can click the LinkedIn icon on our department homepage at: http://www.uidaho.edu/ sci/stat to request to join the group. We have alumni dating from the nineteen eighties through recent graduates in the group, it is a great way to reconnect with old friends and to network. I hope to see you on the group! Best Wishes,
Chris Williams 2
During the summer of 2014, Erkan Buzbas was a visiting scientist at the French National Museum of Natural History (MusĂŠum national d'histoire naturelle). Erkan and his collaborator Paul Verdu (Ph.D.) worked on developing mathematical models and statistical methods to understand the process of admixture in recent history of human populations. Although much is known about particular big waves of migrations among human populations, there is a lack of theoretical models describing complex processes of admixture and statistical methods to perform inference under these processes. Given a genomic data set from an admixed population, statistical methods developed by Erkan and Paul will help to make inference about the number of admixture events in founding of the admixed population and the duration of these admixture events. In February, Dr. Brian Dennis was invited by Humboldt State University in Arcata, California to give the "Lamberson Ecology Lecture," an annual endowed evening presentation at Humboldt open to the public. His presentation was titled "Which would you prefer, taking a statistics course or having a root canal?" In April, he was an invited speaker in the Biomathematics Seminar Series at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His presentation there was titled "The logistic model of population growth, revisited". His ongoing research projects include mathematical modeling of the collapse of honeybee colonies and of the tipping points in the survival of rare populations (so called Allee effects) caused by the fact of being rare. Paul Hohenlohe studies the fitness of cutthroat trout in the waterways of Montana, where rainbow trout have been introduced. Over the years, rainbow and cutthroat trout have been crossbreeding, producing a hybrid called a cutbow trout. Past studies have shown these hybrids have
a lower fitness level. A species fitness is measured by the number of surviving offspring it has and how well it contributes its genes to the next generation, or in other words, a species survivability. These studies infer that cutbow hybrids are not a real threat to the cutthroat population. He hopes to learn what it means for the population fitness and dynamics of the native cutthroat trout and their increasingly threatened status. (excerpt from IBEST newsletter/by Whitney Schroeder) Tim Johnson has been engaged in two continuing lines of research. One concerns statistical models for data that have been aggregated or permuted for purposes of statistical disclosure control. Data aggregation or permutation can be framed as a missing data problem, but one that requires somewhat computationally-intensive simulationbased methods for likelihood- or posteriorbased inferences. Dr. Johnson has been developing and refining both the models and computational methods for aggregated or permuted data. The other line of research has been several collaborative projects with researchers in ecology from the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho, and from the School of the Environment at Washington State University. Stephen Lee has been involved in three ongoing research projects: 1) Washington State Department of Corrections on risk assessment in criminal recidivism; 2) Korean Research Council on experimental designs and statistical analyzes in the area of virus detection and diagnostic performance; 3) Hong Kong Research Grant Council on how Capitalism works in China State-Owned enterprises. He has arranged a yearlong visit of a Chinese professor Dr. Juan Wei, School of Economics and Management, Nanjing Universi-
ty of Information Science and Technology, to come to UI for collaborations in Statistical Learning and Data Mining from August 2015 to July 2016. Renae Shrum is responsible for the Student Assistance Center to tutor the introductory statistics classes. They have been in the library for a few years now and that is going well.. However, this year the library is doing remodeling of the first floor (where they were housed) and they have moved up to the second floor. Renae has recently been introduced to teaching Engineering Outreach (EO) courses for the department. She started with helping out Chris with one of his EO classes and is now teaching her own. The first course she recorded was Stat 251 and she is currently recording an introduction to programming in both SAS and R. Earlier this year, Bahman Shafii attended the Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture in Manhattan, Kansas where the results of two collaborative research works were presented. Subsequently, two articles were prepared and submitted for publication in the refereed proceedings of the conference. A paper was also presented at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meeting in Seattle, WA and three collaborative presentations were made at the 2015 American Dairy Science Association & American Society of Animal Science Joint Meetings in Orlando, Florida. Thus far, he has three refereed publications for 2015, and two additional manuscripts are submitted and currently under review. John Merickel, his M.S. graduate student in Statistics, graduated in May. Bahman is currently serving on four (two Masters and two Ph.D.) graduate committees. He has continued organizing the Applied Statistics Seminar series. Michelle Wiest’s research group has tackled some big issues this year including the use of unmanned aerial systems for quantifying Chinook salmon spawning, bringing
culture and demographic elements into models for the West African Ebola epidemic and determining best practices for archiving and sharing social science data. Michelle has also taken on a new role as the Director of the Collaboratorium for Modeling Complex Problems, which is growing fast with support from the recently awarded Center for Modeling Complex Interactions (NIH COBRE funded) and from the Idaho MILES project (NSF EPSoR funded). The Statistical Consulting Center also continues to thrive and provide support for research across campus while providing training opportunities for our statistics graduate students. Chris Williams has been collaborating on research projects in forestry and in criminology. He has been attending the Joint Statistical Meetings each summer, and was able to visit with a number of alumni in Boston in 2014 and in Seattle in 2015. He is still working on making updates to his webpages for courses that he is currently teaching. If you would like to see his latest SAS and R code for Stat 507 and Stat 550, you can view them at http:// www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~chrisw/ stat507live/lecture507y15.htm and http:// www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~chrisw/ stat550live/lect550y15.htm .
Friends and colleagues of Dr. Dale Everson, wishing to recognize his association with and service to the University of Idaho established an endowment in his honor in 1996. Dale Everson was professor of statistics at the University of Idaho from 1962 to 1996 and also served as Division Director. The purpose of this endowment is to provide fellowships to students enrolled in the Department of Statistical Science at the University of Idaho who achieved excellence in academics. This year’s winners are: Brenda Hanley and Evan Martin They received a scholarship, certificate and were honored with a luncheon attended by Chris Williams, Darlene Everson, and Dale Everson.
Everson Awards 2015 (left to right) Darlene Everson, Brenda Hanley, Evan Martin, and Dale Everson
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Noha Aziz joined us from Saudi Arabia and received her BS in Mathematics from King Abdulaziz University. Her thesis " Estimating the Impact of Cultural Variation on Epidemic Behavior " is with Dr. Wiest.
Student Offices Many of you may remember, fondly or not, the large office space in the basement of Brink Hall that houses many of our graduate students. It was a mix of cast-off furniture with much wasted space. We purchased new desks this fall. Not only does it feel larger, it gives the room a more professional look with more space for group study.
Amanda Bowe earned a BS in Wildlife and Fisheries Science from Penn State University. After graduation, she moved out west and took several jobs monitoring amphibian populations throughout the Rocky Mountains. She is currently pursuing an MS in Statistics including a thesis on occupancy modeling and expects to graduate in spring 2016. After graduation, Amanda plans to use her new statistical knowledge to continue to aid conservation and management. Amanda Culley is from Pullman, WA. She has a BS in Food Science from WSU, and worked as a Quality Assurance/ Researcher and Development lab technician for five years in Portland, OR. Now she is back on the Palouse and working towards an MS in Statistics. She just started a consulting practicum. Ensheng (Frank) Dong comes from Taiyuan, China. He received his MS degree in Geography in 2015. Before that, he studied geoscience in Taiwan. Hoping to be a data scientist, Ensheng plans to graduate in summer 2016. His thesis project is with Dr. Lee. Elizabeth Ehrsam is from Coeur d’Alene, ID. She received her BS in Marketing and Productions Operations Management with a minor in statistics from the University of Idaho in 2011. Having returned to the University, she plans on getting her MS degree in hopes of becoming a data analyst or a marketing researcher.
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Brenda Hanley has completed her first year as a graduate student. She holds a BA in Geography and Land Studies, and a BS in Mathematics. Brenda plans on completing a thesis with Dr. Dennis, where they will statistically assess the exciting interstices between matrix mathematics and the Leslie Matrix model of wildlife management. She has just been accepted into the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology PhD program at UI. Natalie Heller is originally from Richland, WA. She received her BS in Mathematics from the University of Idaho in 2014. She is pursing the consulting option for her M.S. degree. Over the summer, she worked on consulting projects as well as taking consulting credits. She is expecting to graduate in December, 2015 and pursue a career in some line of consulting. Bailey Hescock is from McCall, Idaho. After receiving her BS in Mathematics with a minor in Economics from the University of Idaho in 2014, she is now pursuing her MS in Statistical Science. This past summer she worked for The Hartford Insurance in Hartford, CT as an intern for their Property and Casualty Program. She plans to graduate in December of 2015 and pursue a career in Actuarial Science. Cara Leatherman is from McCall, Idaho. She got her BS in Biology from the University of Idaho after having acquired a Graduate Gemology degree from the Gemological Institute of America from Whitman College. She decided on a career in statistics because she finds the process of research fascinating. She is currently working on her thesis, dealing with density dependence and carrying capacity. She will graduate in spring 2016.
Evan Martin is from Juneau, Alaska. He has a BS in Automotive Technology with an emphasis in Supply Chain Management and a BS in Statistics. Evan will complete an MS in statistics in spring 2016 and he is planning on pursuing a PhD in computational biology. Elizabeth Ng is originally from Chester, New Jersey. She received a BA in Biology from Pomona College, and has just completed a MS in Natural Resources at UI studying lake trout population dynamics. Elizabeth plans to continue her studies at UI with an MS in Statistical Science, which she will complete in spring 2016. Her thesis will focus on evaluating methods for monitoring steelhead populations in Idaho.
at Washington State University. She will complete her degree in spring 2016. Adam Young is originally from Bethlehem, PA. He received a BS in Biology from the State University of New York College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry in 2011. He then began working on his PhD in the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho, researching wildfireclimate relationships in boreal forest and arctic tundra ecosystems. He seeking a concurrent MS in Statistics with a focus in consulting. He will finish his MS in the spring of 2016.
Our Recent Graduates Spring 2015 Kimberly Freeman Joe Hicks Mike Krumberger Jacek Maselko John Merickel
Summer 2015 Mitchell Davies Wes McClintick Brian Quigley
Fall 2015
Kristen Petersen was raised in Park City, UT. She studied Mathematics at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, CA. The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program initially brought her to the University of Idaho; however, she is now pursuing a MS in Statistics concurrently. Kristen's thesis involves analyzing the microbial and fungal communities within soil samples taken from the Priest River Experimental Forest in Northern Idaho.
Natalie Heller Bailey Hescock
Chung Yan Wang is an international student from Hong Kong. In May of 2015, she finished her BS degrees in mathematics and nutrition at University of Idaho. After that, she joined the statistical science program with an emphasis in consulting. Her career goal is to be a statistical analyst. Dongyun Wang joined us after an MS in Bio & Ag Engineering at UI. She completed her Internship using Structural Equation Modeling with Dr. Olusola Adesope
Consultants Fall 2015 (l-r) Adam Young, Evan Martin, Amanda Culley, Natalie Heller, Dongyun Wang
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As a service, the Department of Statistical Science offers the Statistics Assistance Center (SAC) to help students taking Stat 251, 301, and 431 by providing individual tutors on a drop-in basis. It is now located at the library. Our teaching assistants all spend time working in the SAC in lieu of office hours. Last spring we were able to secure an increase in funding for the SAC and are now able to hire 3 fulltime teaching assistants who work solely in the SAC. This has allowed us to be open more hours each week.
Renae Shurm (back) Bailey Hescock (l) Natalie Heller (r) Working in the Statistical Assistance Center
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Peter Bonte (1990) has recently published a new book called Be a Model Communicator. The purpose of the book is to teach modelers how to present their results to an audience. Below is an abstract for the book: Modeling and simulation are increasingly being used in science, business, and engineering to understand and explain complex systems, make predictions, and improve decision-making. Modeling today is not just about developing models. Modelers must be able to efficiently and effectively communicate their results to both laypeople and other scientists for their results to be useful and have impact. Unfortunately, scientists are taught to be boring and academic, all in the name of scientific rigor and professionalism. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this engaging and dynamic book, Dr. Bonate shows step-by-step from planning to delivery how to improve your oral presentations and become a better model communicator. Numerous examples and humorous anecdotes are used to explain concepts and material. Anyone who engages in modeling and simulation will benefit from reading this book.
Kedar Koirala (2005) is currently working as Postdoctoral Research Associate for USDA-ARS at Washington State University, Pullman, WA since July 2014. His current job functions are as follows: Analysis of variability and uncertainty of spatial, temporal and spatiotemporal crop yield, crop fertilization, and crop rotation using statistics and GIS applications. Involvement in science based development of cropping agroecosystem and management practices relevant to precision agriculture.
Mentoring graduate students in research in crop, soil and environmental data analysis, mapping and interpretation of results in meaningful management perspectives.
Christian Salas (2006) He is currently an Associate Professor of Biometrics at the Forest Science Department at the Univer sidad de La Frontera, in Temuco, Chile. After graduating from UI, he pursued a PhD in Biometrics at Yale University (2011). He is currently involved in research dealing with applied statistics in several different topics, but especially related to ecology and natural resources. Christian was just recently involve in research that was published in Nature and the paper was selected for the cover of the journal issue. Michelle Tschida (1996) has recently started job searching. Please reach out to her if you hear of anything. She seems to have gravitated to R programming (although she has over 10 years experience with SAS), SQL, modeling, design of experiments, analytics and some big data. Her e-mail is michelletschida@gmail.com Norm Varin (1989) was recently appointed to head Idaho Physicians Network (PacificSource Health Plans). Varin will also continue his current role as Director of Government Relations.
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Internships: For eleven short weeks this past summer Bailey Hescock interned with The Hartford Insurance Group in Hartford, CT as an actuarial intern with their Worker’s Compensation Reserving team. Through this internship, she was assigned two projects that benefitted the company by improving her team’s understanding of the worker’s compensation product. These projects challenged her to think critically and to apply statistical knowledge while challenging Bailey to learn more techniques for SAS coding, including map creation. This opportunity allowed for her to network with dozens of professionals and to discover what topics and methods to focus on during her last semester.
statistics and engineering training as a statistics researcher for engineering projects in the future. By doing this internship project, she realized that she also enjoys working in other fields. It has given her confidence and encouragement to keep learning and strengthening the knowledge of statistics.
Brian Quigley worked as a medical research intern at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon. The internship was a great experience where he gained an understanding in the area of data analysis and management in the medical research field. He is confident this research experience will help him greatly in his future career.
Catherine Manning worked at the Stamford, CT Board of Education in the Research and Data Analysis department. As an educator, she found it very insightful to learn how complex maintaining student data is. From a statistical perspective, She developed an appreciation for "clean" data which can be difficult to obtain. The focus of her work was to gather progress data on elementary school students who were performing academically below grade level and had been enrolled in one or more special programs, or interventions, to help bring them up to grade level performance. The main focus was on reading scores and interventions because of a district-wide improvement plan that has an emphasis on literacy.
Dongyun Wang did her internship with the Department of Educational Leadership, Sport Studies, and Educational/Counseling Psychology at WSU. Her tasks focused on data analysis using a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. In this internship, she had a chance to learn new statistical methods, including SEM techniques, SPSS and AMOS software. Due to her engineering background, she feels she can combine her
Although she learned a lot about how students are identified with base line scores and tracked with repeated measure progress assessments, Catherine doesn't think this particular area of Educational Research will be her career path. She plans on staying in the classroom and using this experience in the future perhaps as a consultant.
We’d love to hear from you !
Send us an update on your life since graduation. Please include career updates, family news, and favorite UI memories. You may email us at: stat@uidaho.edu
of Chicago and began working on highthroughput sequencing data related to human diseases, such as that from HIV patients and from cancer patients. Before the move to the UI, I spent a year visiting Stanford University, where I started work on developing causal inference methods for integrating multiple types of highthroughput data, with the aim of not only identifying causal genetic variants and genes, but also how the genes interact with one another to affect the phenotype. In general, I am interested in developing statistical models and efficient computational methods for genetic and genomic data. I am also interested in applying these methods to tackle problems related to human genetics and diseases. Outside work I enjoy many activities, such as jogging, swimming, tennis and indoor climbing. I played softball and soccer with several teams in Seattle and in Chicago. I also love music, especially classical music, with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini being my favorite, and rock, with Bruce Springsteen and Wang Feng being my favorite singers/songwriters.
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Chris Williams, Winner of the College of Natural Resources Bridge Builder Award 2015 The CNR Bridge Builder Award honors an individual faculty, staff person or group employed with an organization or unit with which CNR collaborates. The individual or group is external to CNR and has contributed to substantial and lasting connections to people, units, programs or departments within CNR. From the awards banquet program: Christopher Williams is the chairman of the Departments of Statistics and Mathematics at the University of Idaho, where he is a professor of statistics. He works collaboratively with the College of Natural Resources, teaching statistics to CNR students. He has taught 14 different statistics courses and has published 61 papers, including papers published in Environmental and Ecological Statistics and the North American Journal of Fisheries Management. As a statistical consultant, he has been integral in planning research studies, data analysis and interpretation of results for hundreds of graduate students, staff and faculty campus wide, but the majority of his clients have come from CNR. He has served on more than 80 graduate student committees at UI, with many of them from CNR. He created a short course for, and gave statistical advice, to several of the graduate students in the join UI-Costa Rica IGERT program. Kurt Pregitzer Dean of CNR (l) and Chris Williams (r)
 Yes, I want to support the students and faculty in the Department of Statistical Science! My Gift of $_________is enclosed (Please make checks payable to University of Idaho Foundation, Inc.) Please Direct my gift to: Department of Statistical Science Gifts ARN325 Name _______________________________________________________________________________ Address _____________________________________________________________________________ City _________________________________________ State ______________ Zip _________________ Phone _______________________________________ email __________________________________ University of Idaho Degrees _____________________________________________ Years__________ News (career, family, etc.)_______________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________ Please return to: University of Idaho, Foundation, Inc., 875 Perimeter Dr. - MS 3417, Moscow, ID 83844-3147
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