19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

Summer 2014

‘

Volume 6Issue 1

New Deputy Director, Associate Director AppointedThe Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Insti-

tute (SAMSI) is pleased to announce the appointments of three new members of the Directorate.

Sujit Ghosh, Professor of Statistics at NC State University (NCSU) and currently a Program Director in the NSF Divi-sion of Mathematical Sciences, will become Deputy Director of SAMSI beginning September 8, 2014. Sujit’s research interests are in the area of Bayesian statistical methods for analyzing biomedical, econometrics and environmental models. Ghosh previously participated in several SAMSI programs, including as Faculty Fellow representing NCSU in the 2011/12 program on Uncertainty Quantification.

Ghosh received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Connecticut in 1996, and is actively involved in teaching, supervising and mentoring graduate students at the doctoral and master levels. He has super-vised over 30 doctoral gradu-ate students and 3 post-doctor-al fellows. He has also served as a statistical investigator and consultant for over 40 different research projects funded by various leading private indus-tries and federal agencies. In addition to his time at NCSU, he has been a visiting profes-sor at Thammasat University in Thailand, Bocconi Uni-versity in Italy, Middle East Technical University in Tur-key, Technical University of Crete in Greece and National University in Singapore. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the recipient of the 2008 IISA Young Investigator Award. He has also been elected as the President of NC Chapter of ASA in 2013 and served as the Co-Director of Graduate Programs in Statistics at NCSU managing over 150 students annually during 2010-2013, and the Project Director of a training program for undergraduates funded by the NSF during 2007-2013.

“Sujit brings to SAMSI a mature understanding of SAMSI’s research mission, as well as administrative and grant management experience which will be invaluable as we plan for our next fund-ing cycle,” noted Richard Smith, Director of SAMSI.

Thomas Witelski, Professor of Mathematics at Duke University, specializing in nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid dynamics, will become Associate Director of SAMSI for a three year term beginning July 1, 2014. His expertise will be valuable on the applied mathematics side of SAMSI’s activities, and he will also act as SAMSI’s liaison with Duke University during this period.

Witelski received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathemat-ics from California Institute of Technology in 1995. Before working at Duke, he was an NSF Postdoc-toral Fellow and an Applied Mathematics Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a member of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the American Mathematical Society and Tau Beta Pi. He is also the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Engineering Mathematics, and a Divi-sion Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. He also serves on the editorial board for the European Journal of Applied Mathematics and Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Series B.

Ghosh and Witelski will replace Snehalata Huzurbazar from the University of Wyoming, whose term as Deputy Direc-tor ends June 30, 2014, and Ezra Miller from Duke University, whose term as Associate Director also ends June 30, 2014.

To fill the gap between Snehalata and Sujit, SAMSI is delighted to welcome back Pierre Gremaud, Professor of Mathe-matics at NCSU, as Interim Deputy Director for July and August, 2014. During this period, Pierre will be primarily responsible for the education and outreach side of SAMSI’s activities. Pierre pre-viously served as Associate Director of SAMSI from July 2008 through December 2009, and as Deputy Director from January 2010 through June 2012.

Tom Witelski, Duke University, will be will be a new Associate Director of SAMSI.

Sujit Ghosh will be the new Deputy Director of SAMSI.

From the director…

Graduate Fellow Profile: Kelly BodwinSAMSI graduate fellow Kelly Bodwin

recently received a three-year NSF graduate fellowship. Out of over 14,000 applicants, just 2,000 people receive this award.

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is known to select recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The program allows the recipient to conduct research and pro-fessional development at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education they choose. NSF Fellows are anticipated to be-come knowledge experts who can contrib-ute significantly to research, teaching and innovations in science and engineering.

People from across the country in all the STEM fields are eligible to apply for this award. The fellowship grant money goes to both the recipient and its host institution. Kelly is in the second year of the graduate program at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Statis-

tics and Operations Research Department (STOR). Her advisor is Andrew Nobel of UNC’s STOR Department.

Kelly grew up in Cupertino, Califor-nia, just a stone’s throw from Apple and other high tech giants. She conducted her undergraduate work at Harvard University. At first, she was looking at majoring in either physics or mathematics, but after she took a statistics course, she discovered that this was her calling as she could use her love of math in a way that she could see the results of her work in action.

Kelly’s area of interest is in cluster-ing and classification. She looks at points of data that have some kind of variation or distance between these points. “You are trying to find a group of variables that is more closely associated,” Kelly explained, “Usually you have just one set of vari-ables that are closely associated that you are studying. But, what I am looking at is not one, but two, so what I’m focusing on what is most differentially clustered.” For

example, she might look at two sample groups, such as one group might be the treatment group and the other is the control group. Each group would have gene expression and she forms correlation matrices, so the correlation would be the measure of distance and she wants to find a group of genes that is more correlated in one sample group than another. Kelly thinks this method could be applied to a number of different applications in addi-tion to the study of genes.

Kelly also recently won the best poster prize at the Women in Statistics Conference that was held in Cary, NC May 15-17. Ten of the 120 posters won a best poster prize. Her title was “Mining of Differential Correlation.”

Summer is a time of change of many people, and that is cer-tainly true for us at SAMSI. At the end of June we say goodbye to two of our directorate members. Snehalata Huzurbazar will return to the University of Wyoming after two years as SAMSI’s Deputy Director, while Ezra Miller will come to the end of his term as the Associate Director representing Duke. Both of them have made very distinctive contributions to SAMSI.

Snehalata has expertly led SAMSI’s education and out-reach activities during the last two years, and made an enormous contribution as Directorate Liaison for our upcoming Beyond Bioinformatics program, on which theme she also organized a workshop in Bangalore as part of our SAVI program with India. The Deputy Director also leads SAMSI’s diversity efforts: Sne-halata is the chief organizer of this fall’s Modern Mathematics workshop in Los Angeles, and she worked with the National Al-liance for Doctoral Studies in the Mathematical Sciences to bring to SAMSI the first-ever diversity workshop focused on statistics and biostatistics graduate programs. She also organized a session at the recent Women in Statistics conference in the Triangle (see photo on pg. 3).

Beyond her organizational contributions to SAMSI, how-ever, Snehalata has contributed much to our thinking about the breadth of our mission, and particularly, how to make it easier for researchers with young families to participate fully in our activities. Thanks to her, we now have a webpage with detailed information about childcare and other facilities for families, and have tried to make more flexible arrangement for visitors and workshop participants who come with young children. These are important issues for the entire profession, but SAMSI is in a unique position to take the lead and Snehalata has pointed the

way forwards for all of us in doing that.Ezra’s contributions to SAMSI have been

of a different nature but no less valuable to us. He was Directorate Liaison for our recently concluded program Low-Dimensional Struc-ture in High-Dimensional Systems, which is one of the biggest programs SAMSI has organized in terms of number of visitors and working groups. One innovation of this program was two workshops jointly organized with institutes in other countries - the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica Barcelona, Spain, and a workshop at the Fields Institute that was co-orga-nized with the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute. Ezra was also Directorate Liaison for the summer program on Neuroim-aging Data Analysis, which laid the groundwork for a full-year program on Neuroscience which has just been approved by our National Advisory Committee (more details on this in our next newsletter!). We will miss Ezra’s energy and considerable enthu-siasm which he has injected into all his activities with SAMSI.

Fortunately for us, we have some very capable replacements for Snehalata and Ezra – elsewhere in this newsletter, you can read profiles of Sujit Ghosh and Tom Witelski. And it’s not quite “all change” on the SAMSI directorate, as Ilse Ipsen, our Associ-ate Director representing NCSU, has agreed to serve a second three-year term. Ilse has also brought much energy and organiza-tional skill to her work with SAMSI and we’re fortunate that she has agreed to continue.

Chief Meteorologist Greg Fishel Lec-ture

Directorate:Richard Smith| DirectorThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Snehalata Huzurbazar| Deputy DirectorUniversity of Wyoming/North Carolina State University

Ilse Ipsen| Associate DirectorNorth Carolina State University

Alan Karr | Associate DirectorNational Institute of Statistical Sciences

Ezra Miller | Associate DirectorDuke University

SAMSI Staff: Amarjit Budhiraja | VI-MSS Coordinatorbudhiraj at email.unc.edu

Gordon Campbell | Operations Directorcampbell at samsi.info

Rita Fortune | Financial Analystrita at samsi.info

Thomas Gehrmann | Program Assistanttgehrmann at samsi.info

Karem Jackson | Workshop Specialistkjackson at samsi.info

Katherine Kantner | Webmasterkak at niss.org

Sue McDonald | Senior Program Coordinatorsue at samsi.info

Jamie Nunnelly | Communications Directornunnelly at niss.org

Lori Pennington| Program Assistantpennington at samsi.info

James Thomas | Computational Systemshelp at samsi.info

Follow us! @NISSSAMSI

Read our blog at: samsiatrtp.wordpress.com

After experiencing a tragic and trun-cated end to the 2013 Boston Marathon, race organizers were faced not only with grief but with hundreds of administrative decisions, including plans for the 2014 race – an event beloved by Bostonians and people around the world.

One of the issues they faced was what to do about the nearly 6,000 runners who were unable to complete the 2013 race. The Boston Athletic Association, the event’s organizers, quickly pledged to pro-vide official finish times for these runners. Thinking ahead, they also had to consider

how to provide these runners with an op-portunity to qualify for the 2014 race.

To seek advice on these issues, they contacted Richard Smith, director of SAMSI, to come up with a statistical pro-cedure for predicting each runner’s likely finish time based on their pace up to the last checkpoint before they had to stop. He led a research team that included Franc-esca Dominici and Giovanni Parmigiani at Harvard School of Public Health, and Dorit Hammerling, postdoctoral fellow at SAMSI, Matthew Cefalu, Harvard School of Public Health, Jessi Cisewski, Carnegie Mellon University and Charles Paulson, Puffinware LLC.

The results, and the method the researchers developed, were published in the April 11 edition of PLOS ONE.

Team led by SAMSI Researchers Creates Method to Predict Finish Times for 2013 Boston Marathon

The SAMSI undergraduate modeling workshop took place May 18-23, 2014. Students spent a week working in teams using data from the Social Evolution experiment in the MIT Human Dynamics Lab (Maden et al. 2012) to investigate a variety of questions related to the formation and evolution of social networks using data from approxi-mately 100 students in a college dormitory during the 2008-2009 academic year.

Jessi Cisewski, Xia Wang and Bailey Fosdick talk about their experiences at SAMSI and NISS at the Women in Statistics Conference held May 15-17 in Cary, NC. Read more about the conference on the SAMSI blog at www.samsiatrtp.wordpress.org.

SAMSI Director Richard Smith running in the 2014 Boston Marathon. Photo courtesy of MarathonFoto.

19 T.W. Alexander Dr. • P.O. Box 14006 • Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 • 919-685-9350 • info@samsi.info • www.samsi.info

.infoThe Newsletter of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute

19 T. W. Alexander DriveP.O. Box 14006Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-4006

For more information about SAMSI programs and workshops, visit SAMSI’s website at http://www.samsi.info

Calendar of Events for SAMSIComputational Methods for Survey and Census Data in the Social Sciences June 20-21, 2014Montreal, Canada

The International Surface Temperature InitiativeJuly 8-16, 2014Boulder, CO

2014 Industrial Math/Stat Modeling Workshop for Graduate Students (IMSM)July 14-22, 2014Raleigh, NC

1st Annual Graduate Workshop on Environmental Data AnalyticsJuly 28-Aug. 1, 2014Boulder, CO

Program on Mathematical and Statistical Ecology: Opening WorkshopAugust 18-22, 2014RTP, NC

Program on Beyond Bioinformatics: Statistical and Mathematical Challenges: Opening Workshop September 8-12, 2014RTP, NC

Modern Math Workshop 2014 October 15-16, 2014Los Angeles, CA

Undergraduate WorkshopOctober 30-31, 2014RTP, NC