About the Speakers

Dr. Bo Li is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also holds a Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar and an Office of Risk Management & Insurance Research Faculty Scholar. She was also a Data Science Founder Professorial Scholar. Dr. Li received her PhD in Statistics from Texas A&M University in 2006, and then became a Post-Doc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research before joining Purdue as an Assistant Professor in 2008. In 2013 she moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Li’s research mainly focuses on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics and environmental statistics concerning climatology, atmospheric sciences, public health, forestry and agriculture. Dr. Li has served on the editorial boards of several journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (JABES) and Environmetrics, and was a guest editor for a special issue in Statistica Sinica and a special issue in JABES. Her research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, NASA and Sandia National Laboratories. Dr. Li was the recipient of the Young Investigator Award in the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She was also the 2020 H. O. Hartley Award winner. 

Robert Krafty has been Chair and Rollins Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University since 2020, having previously served on the faculties of the Departments of Biostatistics and Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Department of Statistical Science at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.  His research includes the development of theory and methods for learning and conducting inference on high-dimensional time series, functional and signal data.   This methodological work is developed in conjunction with transdisciplinary collaborations to analyze heart rate variability, NIRS, EEG, physical activity recorded by wearable devices, and ecological momentary assessment data collected through mobile apps to monitor and treat mental, behavioral and social health.

Dylan Small received his PhD in Statistics in 2002 from Stanford University with Tze Leung Lai as his thesis advisor.  Dylan is the Universal Furniture Professor of Statistics and Data Science in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science.  His research focuses on causal inference and applications of statistics to public health and public policy.  He was the founding editor of the journal Observational Studies.  Dylan has advised 28 PhD students on their dissertations as well as mentored several undergraduates and postdoctoral fellows on research.  

About the Moderator

Xiufan Yu is an Assistant Professor of Statistics in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics (ACMS) at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. in Statistics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2021, and B.Sc. in Statistics from University of Science and Technology of China in 2016. Her research interests include high-dimensional statistical inference, graphical models, statistical machine learning, and statistical modeling for multi-disciplinary applications in genetics and econometrics.