Department of Statistics Assistant Professor, Naveen Narisetty has been selected for the prestigious Fellowship Award in the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) for the 2019-2020 academic year. CAS Fellows are untenured University of Illinois faculty members with the rank of assistant professor. With the Professors and Associates, they form the intellectual core of the Center for Advanced Study community. Fellows also participate in a yearly roundtable discussion of research interests. Fellows are invited to participate in CAS events, and are given opportunities to present their work to the CAS community.

Each year, the tenured and untenured University of Illinois faculty are invited to submit scholarly or creative proposals for consideration by the Center’s permanent Professors. Faculty members with winning proposals are appointed Associates and Fellows and awarded one semester of release time to pursue their projects in the coming academic year.

Successful candidates are asked to prepare an early description of their projects for publicity purposes as well as a short report on their achievements at the end of their appointments.

Motivated by large-scale medical studies, Professor Narisetty's research will develop new statistical techniques and computational algorithms for detecting and characterizing patient subgroups which exhibit heterogeneous behavior to treatments.  The research will develop a novel statistical framework to detect patient subgroups which exhibit heterogeneous behavior and to characterize these subgroups based on their biological and clinical features. The statistical framework developed will introduce novel statistical models, methodology to estimate the models and computational algorithms scalable to Big Data settings. Quantile regression models and Bayesian techniques will be utilized for developing this framework. To make the proposed statistical and computational research suitable for a variety of scienti c applications, high dimensional and complex structures of the features will be accommodated. The research methods will be useful for personalized medicine so that patient-specific treatment strategies can be implemented.

In accordance with the Center’s mission, these appointments provide an incentive to pursue the highest level of scholarly achievement. They also provide faculty members with an unusual opportunity to explore new ideas and demonstrate early results.