Statistician Rui Song Receives NSF CAREER Award

Rui Song, 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 Song’s research project entitled “Semiparametric and Machine Learning Approaches to Big Data Challenges in Precision Medicine.” The project aims develop cutting-edge semiparimetric methods and machine learning tools to realize the promise of precision medicine, which can be broadly defined as providing the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.

Among the project’s focal points will be developing flexible and efficient methods for discovering optimal individual treatment regimes, as well as developing a general class of these regimes. As part of the work, Song will develop new university courses on statistical learning and semiparametric inference and train high school teachers to communicate these concepts to their students.

Song received her bachelor’s degree in statistics from Peking University in 2001 and her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Wisconsin in 2006.