Jocelyn Chi, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistics, has been awarded the Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. The award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), provides $150,000 to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows working in the area of mathematics or statistics.
The fellowship, which provides two academic years of full-time support, is designed to foster close collaboration between the fellow and a sponsoring scientist to promote the fellow’s professional development. NSF awards up to 35 postdoctoral fellowships in mathematical sciences each year.
Chi, who is scheduled to receive her Ph.D. from NC State in August, will use the award to pursue her research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her project is titled “Provable Randomized Algorithms for Scaling Multivariate Statistical Methods for Analyses of Massive, Complex and Structured Data.” She will be collaborating with and mentored by sponsoring scientist Deanna Needell, professor and Dunn Family Endowed Chair in Data Theory in the Department of Mathematics at UCLA.
The project focuses on developing practical and theoretical foundations for understanding how randomized algorithms can be harnessed to produce rigorous and statistically sensible machine learning methods for modern data analysis and inference applicable to numerous scientific domains.
