Short Bio

I am a Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at The University of Texas at Austin I obtained my Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 under the supervision of Stephen Fienberg.

Prior to joining UT Austin in August 2023, I was a Dean's Chair Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

I am an IMS Fellow.

Research Interests

My research interests revolve mainly around the theoretical properties of statistical and machine learning models for high-dimensional data under various structural assumptions, such as sparsity or intrinsic low dimensionality. In my research work, I have investigated a broad range of issues related to the feasibility of statistical inference in a variety of problems, including high-dimensional regression, time series, privacy, categorical data analysis and graphical modeling, statistical network analysis, algebraic statistics, density-based clustering, topological and geometric data analysis, change-point detection, ranking, and reinforcement learning. Though predominantly of theoretical nature, my research work is motivated by highly practical problems in data science and has direct methodological implications, as it aims at deriving theoretical guarantees in support of existing methods and algorithms.

Service

At CMU, I served as the Associate Dean of Research in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2021-2023 and as the Director of the Ph.D. program in Statistics and Data Science in 2017-2020.
In the past, I was an AE for