Audrey Chang and Angel Zelazny were co-recipients of the Ronald and Rae Iman Scholarship
Audrey is originally from Webster, Texas and moved to Olathe, Kansas when she was six years old. She is co-majoring in Mathematics and Statistics and will be a junior this fall. She also received a College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Award and will be working with Wei-Wen Hsu on a zero-inflated Poisson model with applications to tornado monitoring. What attracted Audrey to statistics was the ability to apply it to most any field of study. Her other interests include playing cello and guitar, biking, running, and badminton.
Angel Zelazny is from from Manhattan, Kansas and will be a sophomore this fall. She became interested in Statistics after taking an AP Stats class in high school as she really enjoys working with numbers. She helps with many activities put on by the KAWSE (the K-State office for promoting women in STEM fields) and is also an assistant coach for the debate and forensics team at the local high school. She also points out that she loves cats.
Nadeesha Mawella and Huaiyu Zhang were co-recipients of the Holly and Beth Fryer Scholarship
Nadeesha is a PhD student in the fourth year at K-State. She is from Sri Lanka and graduated from the University of Peradeniya with a BSc. in Statistics and Operations Research before coming to the US. She has been passionate about Statistics since she was in college and has set as her goal to become a statistician. The primary reason for becoming attracted to the profession is the ability to collaborate with other fields of science and to contribute to projects across a wide variety of disciplines. She has begun her research under Wei-Wen Hsu and is working on a project to investigate the impact of misspecifications on the homogeneity tests for Zero-Inflated models. She will present this research topic this August at the JSMs 2016 in Chicago. In her spare time she enjoys travelling, cooking, and sewing and art work. She has enjoyed her time at K-State and in Manhattan.
Huaiyu Zhang is from Handan, China, a city with more than 3,000 years of history. His study at K-State began in the fall of 2014. He is currently working on the research of bootstrap hypothesis testing. He began learning about statistics nine years ago and found the field exciting for both its theoretical and practical developments. His hobbies include reading, watching movies, badminton and guitar. Studying at K-State and living in Manhattan, KS has been a nice experience for him.
Xintong Li was the recipient of the Howard Siepman Memorial Scholarship
He originates from Beijing and has completed three years at K-State as a PhD student. His research is on spatial modeling of large scale data. An article in the New York Times describing data science as a fourth paradigm triggered his interest in pursuing the PhD in statistics. In his spare time he enjoys fishing, watching movies, and conversation with friends.
Guotao Chu was the recipient of the Statistics Department Scholarship
He is from the Shandong Province in China and joined our program in fall of 2015. He is completing coursework and has not yet begun his research. Data science and data mining are his interests and are what attracted him to the field. In his spare time he enjoys badminton and cooking.
Sharif Mahmood and Mengjiao Wu were recipients of the Ray and Carolyn Waller Scholarship
Sharif has completed a sixth semester as a PhD student in the Department of Statistics. He is working on “Causal inference for massive data using graph theory” with Dr. Michael Higgins. He is currently a K-State Graduate Student Ambassador and spends time working as a volunteer in a few different charities. In his spare time, he enjoys studying historical events and playing cricket. He is from Bangladesh.
Mengjiao Wu is originally from Hangzhou, a beautiful lakeside city in southeast China. She arrived at K-State in August 2012 and is pursuing the PhD degree. She is working with Dr. Suzanne Dubnicka on inference techniques for the evaluation of blood signatures for potential application in continuous identity authentication. In her words, she likes the way Bayesian statisticians think and is eager to become one. In her spare time she enjoys swimming and cross-stich, and loves to play with visual space, decorating walls and ceiling. She is an enthusiastic badminton player and plays at least twice a week.
Xukun Li was the recipient of the Arthur D. and Lavonia B. Dayton Scholarship
Xukun came to K-State from China in fall 2014. He has begun research on classification of cancer types based on gene expression. In his spare time he enjoys playing badmitton.
A final scholarship to be awarded is the Dr. Lynn Ying-Shiang Lin Graduate Research Scholarship which is designed for students with financial need who are involved in food safety or clean water research.
It’s worth noting that the scholarship was offered to a promising undergraduate student, Ye Li, who was graduating with her BS in statistics. Ye had already spent time consulting on projects in our Statistical Consulting Laboratory – a task unusual for an undergraduate. She was applying to graduate programs in statistics. Alas, she was admitted to Yale biostatistics and decided to go there. Though we would like to have her here we are happy for her and wish her well. The Lin scholarship will be awarded in fall once students on research appointments are decided.