Rice University doctoral students Joseph Feldman and Zijian Zeng are recipients of the 2023 James R. Thompson Student Award for their use of modern statistical methods and tools in data science to develop models that quantify uncertainty and predictive inference.
Recipients of the annual award, which carries a $1,000 prize, are announced at the James R. Thompson Distinguished Lecture. The honorary event celebrates the life of the Rice professor and founding chair of the Department of Statistics in 1987 and co-founder of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES) in 2002.
Both students were awarded their doctorate on May 5.
Feldman studied Bayesian generative models for mixed data types with applications in synthetic data generation, inference with missing data, and quantile regression. Daniel Kowal, the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of Statistics, served as his adviser.
Feldman’s research has been published in the Annals of Applied Statistics and received a 2022 Best Paper Award from the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association (ASA). His most recent work was awarded a 2023 Best Paper Award from the ASA Section on Bayesian Statistical Science and from the Survey Research Methods, Government Statistics, and Social Statistics Sections of the ASA. He has accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University working in Professor Jerry Reiter’s group.
At Duke, Feldman will investigate methods for creating and disseminating privacy-preserving synthetic data for public use as well as methods for extracting information from massive and complex surveys that may be subject to missing values and intricate sampling designs.
Zeng doctoral research involved the development of interpretable Bayesian methods for time series forecasting and image-on-scaler regression and applies machine learning techniques to clinical data. Meng Li, the Noah Harding Assistant Professor of Statistics, and Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, were his advisors.
Zeng’s research has been published in the International Journal of Forecasting, Bayesian Analysis, and Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, respectively. His work on the spatial global-local spike-and-slab prior previously won a 2022 Best Paper award from the ASA Mental Health Statistics Section and a 2022 runner-up award from the ASA Statistics in Imaging Section. After graduation, Zeng will join PROS Holdings, Inc., a Houston-based company providing an AI-based platform that optimizes selling and shopping in the digital economy worldwide.
The late James Thompson joined the Rice faculty in 1970 and retired after 46 years. In 1987, the Department of Statistics moved from the mathematics science department to the school of social sciences and became a separate department with Thompson as the founding chair. The department moved to the George R. Brown School of Engineering in 1990.
- Shawn Hutchins, Communications and Marketing Specialist
(Updated from original story by Patrick Kurp, Engineering Communications)
