Fang Liu (statistician)

Last updated

Fang Liu is a Chinese-American statistician and data scientist whose research topics include differential privacy, statistical learning theory, Bayesian statistics, regularization, missing data, and applications in biostatistics. She is a professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Notre Dame. [1] [2]

Contents

Education and career

Liu was talented in mathematics as a child, competed in mathematics competitions, and wanted to become a mathematician, but was discouraged from doing so by her parents, who wanted her to become a physician. As a compromise, she studied biology at Peking University, [2] where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1997.

She began her graduate studies at Iowa State University intending to study genetics, but quickly switched to a program in statistics, [2] and earned a master's degree there in 1999, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2003. [1] Her dissertation, Bayesian Methods for Statistical Disclosure Control in Microdata, involved both data privacy and Bayesian statistics, and was supervised by Roderick J. A. Little. [3]

After completing her doctorate, she became a researcher at the Merck Research Laboratories. She returned to academia, joining the Notre Dame faculty, in 2011. [4] Her doctoral students at Notre Dame have included Claire McKay Bowen. [5]

Recognition

Liu was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2021, "for novel contributions to differentially private synthetic data and Bayesian modeling; for outstanding interdisciplinary research in clinical and public health studies; for leadership in education and training; and for service to the profession". [4]

Related Research Articles

Jefferson Morris Gill is Distinguished Professor of Government, and of Mathematics & Statistics, the Director of the Center for Data Science, the Editor of Political Analysis, and a member of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University as of the Fall of 2017.

Sylvia Therese Richardson is a French/British Bayesian statistician and is currently Professor of Biostatistics and Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge. In 2021 she became the president of the Royal Statistical Society for the 2021–22 year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David A. Freedman</span>

David Amiel Freedman was a Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a distinguished mathematical statistician whose wide-ranging research included the analysis of martingale inequalities, Markov processes, de Finetti's theorem, consistency of Bayes estimators, sampling, the bootstrap, and procedures for testing and evaluating models. He published extensively on methods for causal inference and the behavior of standard statistical models under non-standard conditions – for example, how regression models behave when fitted to data from randomized experiments. Freedman also wrote widely on the application—and misapplication—of statistics in the social sciences, including epidemiology, public policy, and law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cynthia Dwork</span> American computer scientist

Cynthia Dwork is an American computer scientist best known for her contributions to cryptography, distributed computing, and algorithmic fairness. She is one of the inventors of differential privacy and proof-of-work.

Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2012–2015) and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies (2005–2017) at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.

Jun S. Liu is a Chinese-American statistician focusing on Bayesian statistical inference, statistical machine learning, and computational biology. He was assistant professor of statistics at Harvard University from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 to 2004, he was Assistant, Associate, and full Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Since 2000, Liu has been Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University and held a courtesy appointment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Charles "Chip" Lawrence is an American bioinformatician and mathematician, who is the pioneer in developing novel statistical approaches to biological sequence analysis.

Lynn Kuo is a professor of statistics at the University of Connecticut known for her work on Bayesian inference in phylogeny. With Ming-Hui Chen and Paul O. Lewis, she is the author of Bayesian Phylogenetics: Methods, Algorithms, and Applications.

Elizabeth H. Slate is an American statistician, interested in the Bayesian statistics of longitudinal data and applications to health. She is the Duncan McLean and Pearl Levine Fairweather Professor of Statistics at Florida State University. Some of Slate's most heavily cited work concerns the effects of selenium on cancer. Slate's research has also included work on the early detection of osteoarthritis.

Tian Zheng is a Chinese-American applied statistician whose work concerns Bayesian modeling and sparse learning of complex data from applications including social networks, bioinformatics, and geoscience. She is a professor of statistics at Columbia University, and chair of the Columbia Department of Statistics.

Raquel Prado is a Venezuelan Bayesian statistician. She is a professor of statistics in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been elected president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the 2019 term.

Tamara Ann Broderick is an American computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works on machine learning and Bayesian inference.

Daniela Calvetti is an Italian-American applied mathematician whose work concerns scientific computing, and connects Bayesian statistics to numerical analysis. She is the James Wood Williamson Professor of Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University.

Haiyan Huang is a Chinese-American biostatistician. She works as a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Center for Computational Biology. She is the coauthor of highly cited work on the human genome, published as part of the ENCODE research consortium, and has also published foundational work on the statistical modeling of experimental reproducibility.

Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs. In 2021, she was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology.


Elena Aleksandrovna Erosheva is a Russian-American statistician and social scientist whose research applies Bayesian hierarchical modeling and latent variable models to problems in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. She is a professor at the University of Washington, appointed jointly in the Department of Statistics and the School of Social Work, and the director of the university's Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences.

Hongmei Zhang is a Chinese-American biostatistician at the University of Memphis, where she is Bruns Endowed Professor in the Division of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Environmental Health Sciences, director of the division, program coordinator for biostatistics, and affiliated professor in the departments of mathematical sciences and biology. Her statistical interests include feature selection, biclustering, and Bayesian networks; she is also interested in the application of statistical methods to phenotype and genetic data and to epigenetics.


Elizabeth Mannshardt is an American environmental statistician, professor, and government executive. She is the Associate Director of the Information Access and Analytic Services Division at the United States Environmental Protection Agency and an adjunct associate professor in the department of statistics at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on climate change and extremes in climate and weather.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marie Lynn Miranda</span> American data scientist and academic administrator

Marie Lynn Miranda is an American economist, data scientist, and academic administrator serving as the tenth chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago and a vice president of the University of Illinois System since 2023. She was previously the provost and a professor of applied computational mathematics and statistics at the University of Notre Dame. A self-taught toxicologist and environmental scientist, Miranda researches children's environmental health and geospatial health informatics.

Claire McKay Bowen is an American statistician whose work focuses on data privacy, differential privacy, synthetic data, and their effects on the statistical analysis of economic data. She is a senior fellow and head of the statistical methods group in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population of the Urban Institute, an American think tank.

References

  1. 1 2 "Fang Liu", People, Notre Dame Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, retrieved 2021-07-28
  2. 1 2 3 "Facts, Figures and Frontiers: Fang Liu, College of Science", Women Lead, University of Notre Dame, 8 March 2021, retrieved 2021-07-28
  3. Fang Liu at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. 1 2 McCool, Deanna Csomo (3 May 2021), "Liu named Fellow of American Statistical Association", News, University of Notre Dame College of Science, retrieved 2021-07-28
  5. Ph.D. Defense: Claire Bowen, University of Notre Dame Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, 27 March 2018, retrieved 2024-05-31