Professor Annie Qu's groundbreaking work in data science has earned the honor of a named professor title Data Science Founder Professor.

Dr. Qu is Professor of Statistics, Affiliated Member of the Institute for Genomic Biology, and Director of the Illinois Statistics Office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was awarded as Brad and Karen Smith Professorial Scholar by the College of LAS at UIUC. Dr. Qu has worked on fundamental issues regarding unstructured large-scale data, and developed cutting-edge statistical methods and theory in machine learning and algorithms on text sentiment analysis, automatic tagging and summarization, recommender systems, tensor imaging data and network data analyses.

In addition, Professor Qu focuses on solving real world problems concerning complex heterogeneous data that arise from medical imaging and network data. Dr. Qu develops powerful statistical methods and tools that are able to flexibly model signal heterogeneity across images, integrate imaging data with multimodal and spatially distributed data, and achieve the extraction of essential information from large volume high-dimensional data. Her research has impacts in many different fields such as biomedical studies, genomic research, public health research, and social and political sciences.

Dr. Qu was a recipient of the NSF Career award in 2004-2009, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She is actively promoting and advancing the discipline of Statistics/Data Science through serving as an officer (Section Chair and Treasurer) for the Statistical Learning and Data Science Section of the American Statistical Association. Recently, she developed a new course on Statistical Learning in Data Science, which has attracted students from many different disciplines at UIUC.

Dr. Qu received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Penn State in 1998. Previously, she was Assistant and Associate Professor at Oregon State University in 1999-2008, and Biostatistician at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1999. She has also held visiting faculty positions in the Department of Biostatistics at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in 2004-2005, and at the University of Washington in 2005-2006.