Chiaromonte and Hunter Named 2022 IMS Fellows

Statistics faculty members Francesca Chiaromonte and Dave Hunter have been named Fellows of The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) for 2022.

Chiaromonte received the award for outstanding contributions to methodology for the analysis of large, complex, and structured data, in particular to the fields of sufficient dimension reduction and envelope models, for outstanding interdisciplinary work in the “Omics” and in the biomedical sciences, and for leadership in interdisciplinary training and mentoring efforts.

Her research interests as a statistician include methods to analyze high-dimensional, complex and potentially under-sampled regression and classification problems (in particular dimension reduction and feature selection methods); computational techniques for the empirical assessment of significance (e.g., re-sampling, perturbation and permutation schemes); latent structure and Markov modeling approaches; and functional data analysis methods. She applies these methods in contemporary “Omics” sciences and other scientific fields – including Meteorology and Economics.

Hunter received the award for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of statistical computing; for major contributions to statistical modeling of networks, and mixture models; for notable contributions to the teaching of statistics; and for service to the profession.

Hunter has published widely on statistical models for networks and is a co-creator of the "statnet" suite of packages for network analysis in R. He co-coined the term "MM algorithms" and has written extensively on this and other EM-like algorithms. He has also extended the theory and computational practice of unsupervised clustering using nonparametric finite mixture models.

Chiaromonte and Hunter join 2021 IMS Fellow recipients and Penn State statistics faculty Nicole Lazar and Aleksandra Slavković.

The designation of IMS Fellow has been a significant honor for over 85 years. Each Fellow is assessed by a committee of their peers and has demonstrated distinction in research or leadership that has profoundly influenced the field.
 
Created in 1935, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics is a member organization that fosters the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability. The IMS has 4,200 active members throughout the world. Approximately 10% of the current IMS membership has earned the status of fellowship.

The announcement of the 2022 IMS Fellows can be viewed on the IMS website.

The Department of Statistics congratulates Francesca and Dave on this momentous achievement.