Ya’acov Ritov will join us as Professor in September 2015.  Ya’acov received his PhD in 1983 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has also been on the faculty since 1984. Ya’acov is one of the most renowned theoretical statisticians today. He is perhaps best known for his truly seminal work in the area of semiparametric inference. His book,  Efficient and Adaptive Estimation in Semiparametric Models, joint with Bickel, Klassen, and Wellner, is a tour de force and remains the ultimate reference for this important area.  

Johann Gagnon-Bartsch will join as Assistant Professor in September 2015. Johann currently is a Neyman Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Statistics in 2012, also at Berkeley. His research interests are in causal inference, machine learning, and nonparametric methods. So far he has focused on developing methodology that blends ideas from these fields for the purpose of analyzing high-dimensional data, especially high-throughput biological data.

Yuekai Sun will join as Assistant Professor in September 2016. Yuekai is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) of Stanford University. He expects to graduate in June 2015. Yuekai’s research focuses on learning from massive datasets. He has developed statistical methods for discovering low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional data and quantifying the uncertainty in the discovered structure. He also works on design of scalable estimators and algorithms suited to modern distributed computing platforms.