The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) has selected Yan Liu – third year PhD student in Statistics – to receive the 2020 IMS Hannan Graduate Student Travel Award. The purpose of the award is to help partially fund the travel and registration for an awardee to attend and possibly present a paper or poster at an IMS sponsored or co-sponsored meeting.

Yan Liu’s paper titled ‘Variational Inference for Latent Space Models for Dynamic Networks’ was the basis of this award being granted. With guidance from her thesis advisor, Professor Yuguo Chen, and additional support from Professor Jeff Douglas, Yan Liu is one of a select few students from across the country who will receive this exclusive award. These awards are available to IMS members who are graduate students studying an area of statistical science or probability who have not yet received a PhD degree.

“I didn’t really expect to get this award at first,” Yan Liu said. “Statistical inference for complex network data is an interesting field to explore, and I will keep working on this,” she added.

The 2020 Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM) is Liu’s conference of choice, which was to take place this year in Philadelphia, PA from August 1, 2020 – August 6, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, JSM will be will now take place remotely for those attending.

This award is named after Professor James Hannan. Known for the Hannan consistency, James Hannan was a faculty member in Mathematics and Statistics at Michigan State University from 1953 until 2002. Professor Hannan was a Fellow of the IMS and received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953 (with research in compound decision theory under Herbert Robbins).