Congratulations to Professor Yuguo Chen and Professor Bo Li who have been approved for named scholar appointments each titled Data Science Founder Professorial Scholar. The named scholars program aims to recognize outstanding members of the faculty and to provide each with a funding allocation to enhance her or his scholarly activities. Professor Chen and Professor Li are richly deserving of this honor and we thank them for their excellent work. Brief biographies are given below.

Yuguo Chen received the B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree in statistics from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 2001. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also affiliated with Department of Computer Science, Information Trust Institute, Computational Science and Engineering, and Illinois Informatics Institute. His research interests include network data analysis, Monte Carlo methods, and dynamic systems. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was an Associate Editor of Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics from 2007-2017. He is currently an Associate Editor of Journal of American Statistical Association.

Dr. Bo Li received her PhD in Statistics from Texas A&M University in 2006, and then became a Post-Doc at National Center for Atmospheric Research before joining the Purdue faculty 2008. In 2013 she moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now a Full Professor in the Department of Statistics. Dr. Li’s research mainly focuses on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics and environmental statistics concerning problems in climatology, atmospheric sciences, public health, forestry and agriculture. Professor Li has served on the editorial boards of several journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association and Environmetrics, and was guest editor for a special issue in Statistica Sinica and special issue in Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics. Her research has been funded by the  NSF, NIH, NASA and Sandia National Laboratories. Professor Li was the recipient of the Young Investigator Award in the ASA section on statistics and the environment and received the campus-wide Teaching for Tomorrow Award while on the Purdue faculty.  Professor Li was recently awarded a fellowship with the Center of Advanced Studies at University of Illinois.