Department of Statistics and Data Science

Professors Receive NSF CAREER Awards

Two Department Professors Receive NSF CAREER Awards

Professor Feng Ruan (pictured left) was recently recognized by the National Science Foundation with a CAREER award effective June 1, 2026. Professor Ruan’s recognition is for his work titled “Beyond Multi-Index Models: Statistical and Algorithmic Foundations for Feature Learning in Compositional Architectures”.

Professor Kaize Ding (pictured right) was recognized by the National Science Foundation with a CAREER Award effective October 1, 2026. Professor Ding was given the award for his work titled “OPENALIGN: Towards Open-World Preference Alignment for Large Language Models”.

Samuel Ozminkowski wins student paper award

Samuel Ozminkowski, a PhD student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science, has been selected as a 2026 Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society (ENAR) Distinguished Student Paper Winner. Samuel earned this distinction for a paper titled “Dynamic Interaction Networks Estimation from High-Dimensional Longitudinal Data via Multivariate Mixed-Effects Models”. Samuel’s achievement will be celebrated at ENAR’s spring meeting, held March 15^th-18^th in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Department of Statistics and Data Science extends their congratulations to Samuel for receiving this prestigious honor!

more information on the ENAR spring meeting