Statistician Eric Laber Receives NSF CAREER Award

Eric Laber, 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 Laber’s research project entitled “Big Computation and the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases.” The project aims to generate new knowledge about infectious disease dynamics and will create a new statistical framework for data-driven management of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs).

EIDs such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS) are becoming increasingly devastating on a global scale, accounting for more than 25 percent of global disease burden. Laber and his team will translate real-time data on the spread of EIDs into recommendations about interventions to minimize illness and deaths resulting from the diseases. The data they gather will help ensure the interventions can be targeted more efficiently and effectively, resulting in lower costs and resource allocation than current solutions.

Laber received his B.S. in mathematics from UCLA in 2005 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Michigan in 2007 and 2011, respectively.