NC State Statistician Receives NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Ana-Maria Staicu, an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at NC State, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, also known as the NSF CAREER award, is one of the highest awards the foundation bestows upon young faculty in the sciences.

The five-year award will support Staicu’s research project entitled, “Next Generation Functional Methods for the Analysis of Emerging Repeated Measurements.” Much of the project concerns the development of new statistical methods for analyzing emerging data structures that are correlated because of their longitudinal-based design. The ideas will be used to gain more insights into the natural evolution of multiple sclerosis. The work has additional potential applications in economics, environmetrics and agriculture.

The award will also fund an educational outreach program. One of the program’s major goals is to increase middle- and high-school students’ exposure to statistical methods through hands-on activities related to Staicu’s research, work that will include a collaboration with NC State’s SMILE Camp. Another goal is to get more undergraduate students interested in cutting-edge statistics research.

Staicu received her B.S. in mathematics from the University of Bucharest in Romania in 2000. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Toronto in 2002 and 2007, respectively.