News Archive

I gave an invited plenary talk at SIAM DM24.

I gave an IMS Mediallion Lecture at SSP 2024.

I was named Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor.

I am on the program committee of the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference (GLBIO 2024) which will take place May 13-16, 2024 at the University of Pittsburgh. You can register here.

My book Modern Discrete Probability: An Essential Toolkit is now available to pre-order on Amazon. It will appear in January 2024.

Our proposal, with Tandy Warnow and Siavash Mirarab, for an IMSI workshop on Contemporary Challenges in Large-Scale Sequence Alignments and Phylogenies: Bridging Theory and Practice has been approved. It will take place in August 2025. More details to come.

My Ph.D. student Max Hill successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations!

I am starting a three-year term on the Academic Planning Council of the College of Letters and Science.

I have a new NSF grant.

My Ph.D. student Yu Sun successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations!

Our new course MATH 444: Graphs and Networks in Data Science, developed jointly with Hanbaek Lyu, has been approved and will be offered in Fall 2023.

My Ph.D. student Shuqi Yu successfully defended her thesis. Congratulations!

Our proposal for a semester-long program on Meeting the Genomics Data Challenge: Theory, Methods, and Applications of Quantitative Phylogenomics at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) has been approved. The program (led by Elizabeth Allman and Laura Kubatko) will take place Fall 2024. More details to come.

I was named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).

This Spring, I have been mentoring an amazing team of undergraduate students through the Madison Experimental Mathematics Lab. They will present their project, entitled Shedding Light on Unexplained Behavior of Phylogeny Estimation Methods, at an open house on Tuesday, May 3 from 2-5pm in Van Vleck 911 (the 9th floor lounge).

I am on the Program Committee of WABI 2022: Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics. The submission deadline is May 18, 2022.

Our proposal for a month-long program on Mathematics of Evolution-Phylogenetic Trees and Networks at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences (IMS) of the National University of Singapore (NUS) has been funded. The program (led by Louxin Zhang and Daniel Huson) will take place 5 Sep 2023 to 29 Sep 2023. More details to come.

I will teach the newly created graduate course MATH/ECE/STAT 888 - Topics in Mathematical Data Science this Fall for the first time. The topic in Fall 2021 is "High-Dimensional Probability and Statistics: Non-Asymptotic Theory."

Hanbaek Lyu, who was hired through the "Foundations of Data Science" cluster, will be joining the UW-Madison Department of Mathematics this Fall as an assistant professor.

I co-organized with Rob Nowak the hybrid IFDS-MADLab Summer School 2021 which took place July 26-30. Slides and video recordings are now available.

The new website of IFDS has launched.

The expanded Institute for Foundations of Data Science, now in a collaboration with the University of Washington, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Chicago has been funded through the NSF TRIPODS Phase II program.

My Ph.D. student Brandon Legried successfully defended his thesis. He is now a postdoc in Deparment of Statistics at the University of Michigan. Congratulations!

UW-Madison's new Data Science Major has officially launched. I serve on its program committee.

I am on the scientific committee of the 41st Midwest Probability Colloquium, which will be held October 10-12, 2019 at Northwestern University.

A new grant, joint with Karl Rohe, has been funded by the NSF.

I am co-organizing a special session on Recent Trends in the Mathematics of Data at the AMS Fall Central Sectional Meeting, held in Madison on Sep 14-15, 2019.

My new undergraduate course, MATH 535: Mathematical Methods in Data Science, has been approved by the university. It will be offered for the first time in Spring 2020. More details to come.

A new grant, joint with Cecile Ane and Curtis Brandt, has been funded by the Joint DMS/NIGMS Initiative to Support Research at the Interface of the Biological and Mathematical Sciences

Our cluster hire proposal "Foundations of Data Science" (with M. Newton, R. Nowak and S. Wright) has been selected by UW's Cluster Hiring Initiative.

I received a Vilas Associates Award for 2019-2021.

I am on the program committees of WABI 2019 and GLBIO 2019.

Our recent work with Karl Rohe on respondent-driven sampling has just appeared in PNAS.

Our paper "Circular Networks from Distorted Metrics" with former Ph.D. student Jason Wang won Best Paper Award at RECOMB 2018.

The Institute for Foundations of Data Science at UW-Madison, in collaboration with the NSF TRIPODS Institutes at the University of Washington and at the University of California-Berkeley, is organizing a summer school on July 24-28, 2018 in Madison. Apply by April 20 here.

I am grateful to the Simons Foundation for supporting my upcoming sabbatical (2018-2019) through a Simons Fellowship.

My paper with Mike Steel on "Likelihood-based tree reconstruction on a concatenation of aligned sequence data sets can be statistically inconsistent" received Honorable Mention in the 2018 Marcus W. Feldman Prize in Theoretical Population Biology.

The new Institute for Foundations of Data Science has been funded through the NSF TRIPODS and NSF Growing Convergence Research programs. More details here and here. The website of IFDS is here.