Prof. John Emerson
Keynote Speaker
Professor of Statistics, Adjunct/ Director of Graduate Studies,
Yale University

Jay Emerson is Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University. His academic work has included Bayesian change point analysis, statistics in sports, computational statistics and graphics, and environmental science. He is the lead statistician of the Yale Environmental Performance Index, and is working to apply similar rigor to the analysis of ESG metrics for applications in finance.

Prof. Bibhas Chakraborty

Guest Speaker
Associate Professor
Centre for Quantitative Medicine and Program in Health Services and Systems Research
Duke-NUS Medical School

Bibhas Chakraborty is an Associate Professor and Ex-Director of the Centre for Quantitative Medicine at the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School (Duke-NUS), as well as an Associate Professor of Statistics and Applied Probability at the National University of Singapore. He also holds an Adjunct Associate Professor position at the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University. Previously (2009-13), he was an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Prof. Susan A. Murphy in 2009. He is the recipient of the Calderone Research Prize for Junior Faculty from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in 2011, and the Young Statistical Scientist Award from the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) in 2017. His core areas of research include statistical reinforcement learning, precision medicine, dynamic treatment regimens, mobile/digital health, adaptive clinical trial designs, and a variety of applications in clinical and behavioral sciences. He wrote the first textbook on dynamic treatment regimens.

Prof. Umashanger Thayasivam

Guest Speaker
Professor of Statistics and Data Science
Department of Mathematics
Rowan University

Dr. Umashanger Thayasivam, PhD, earned his doctoral degree for his research work on Mixture distribution at the University of Georgia. He is currently a Professor in Statistics & Data Science at the Rowan University New Jersey. At the university he lecturers and trains both undergraduate and graduate students. He received Teaching Wall of Fame award for his excellence in teaching in 2018. His interdisciplinary statistical research has spanned diverse areas including mixture distribution, robust estimation, high dimensional data analysis, statistical data mining, biomarker discovery, and educational data mining. He has an excessive experience with collaborating scientist engineers. He has several journal publications and numerous conference presentations. He has been PI/co-PI for several internal and external grants and collaborations, including the recent data mining project with Bristol Myers Squibb pharmaceutical company as well as the NIH grant on blood-based biomarkers for early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. He also has extensive experience in mentoring student research in statistical/data mining research within the last ten years mentored more than 40 undergraduate students, many of which have presented their works at regional and national conferences. Several of his publications are with undergraduate students.