Le Bao named 2025-26 Huck Leadership Fellow
Le Bao, professor of statistics, along with two other Penn State faculty members, have been selected to serve as Huck Leadership Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. The competitive program prepares faculty for future leadership roles while engaging them in strategic initiatives that advance interdisciplinary research at Penn State.
The new fellows will participate in the fifth year of the Huck’s faculty professional development initiative, which involves faculty members in high-level decision-making at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and encourages them to develop projects that contribute to the broader institutional mission.
“The Huck Leadership Fellows program reflects our commitment to developing faculty leaders who can shape the future of interdisciplinary research at Penn State and beyond,” said Research Professor Camelia Kantor, associate director of strategic initiatives at the Huck. “The projects proposed by [the new fellows] are ambitious and interdisciplinary, exemplifying the creativity, collaboration, and impact that define the Huck community.”
Bao will develop a reproducible framework for small area estimation and multi-source data integration to support disease mapping and risk-factor estimation in life-science applications, with an initial focus on bone health. His work builds on extensive experience developing statistical and AI-driven methods for public health, including HIV, global health, cancer research, and aging. Through the fellowship, Bao aims to strengthen interdisciplinary collaborations across the Huck Institutes and create scalable tools that turn fragmented health data into actionable evidence for population health decisions.
Since its launch in 2022, the Huck Leadership Fellows program has provided faculty with opportunities to explore academic leadership while advancing strategic initiatives across the University. Several former fellows have gone on to assume leadership positions, including departmental head, center director, and vice chair for research. For more information about the Huck Leadership Fellows program, visit the Huck Institutes website.