Held at the I-Hotel & Conference Center, the 2022 Bohrer Memorial Student Workshop in Statistics returned to tradition on April 23, 2022. The 2022 Bohrer Workshop would be the first workshop since 2018 to be held in-person. Department of Statistics Chair, Bo Li, kicked off the festivities at 9:00 AM with opening remarks that welcomed attendees back to the annual department event. The Bohrer Workshop provides an opportunity to celebrate and highlight the achievements of doctoral students in statistics. The workshop invites students to come together to share their research with peers through a series of research talks. For the first time for the Bohrer Workshop, students were also given an opportunity to share their research through a submitted poster session.
Beginning in 1994, the Bohrer Workshop, named in memory of Professor Robert Bohrer, has been host to leaders of research and innovation in the field of statistics. Each year, keynote speakers share their insights in various fields of statistics in the Wijsman and Bohrer talks. This year, the keynote speakers were Dawn Woodard, Distinguished Scientist at LinkedIn and formerly of Uber, and Professor Vijay Nair of the University of Michigan and R&D Managing Director at Wells Fargo Bank. Both presenters gave wonderful talks giving students an insight into their respective fields of study.
In addition to the keynote speakers, students presented research topics through a variety of talks throughout the day. The student presentations culminated in the coveted Horace W. Norton Prize talk session. The Norton Prize awards students for outstanding thesis research in statistics. Each year, one student is selected for the Norton Prize while another is awarded the honorable mention. This year, Joshua Loyal was named the Norton Prize winner with Yangfan Zhang being named the honorable mention. Eighteen other students stood before their peers to give brief research talks.
Click here for complete list of student abstracts
With the talks concluded, students were invited to further discuss their research with their peers during the poster session. Twenty posters highlighted research topics ranging from comparing baseball players across eras using the novel Full House Model, to variance estimation of random forests, West Nile Virus forecasting, climate drivers and seasonality of Respiratory Syncytial Virus, and many more.
During the poster session, Dave Zhao, chair of the Bohrer Workshop committee, presented students with their awards. Joshua Loyal and Yangfan Zhang received with their respective Norton Prize and honorable mention, while Anwesha Chakravarti and Byeongjip Kim were announced as the outstanding Qualifying Exam performance winners. Announced earlier in the year, Eduardo Cardenas-Torres was officially awarded the Doctoral Student Teaching Award.
In what is now a Bohrer Workshop tradition, the festivities conclude with a game that take on a statistics twist. This year, the game was “Statistics Charades,” which pitted three teams against one another to mime famous statisticians and statistical theories or theorems in an attempt to win the “David Dalpiaz Achievement Award.” The teams of Sampling Distributions, Populations Parameters, and the Chicago Bulls faced off with The Populations Parameters declared the winners after several rounds of hysterical antics.
Click here for addition 2022 Bohrer Workshop Photos
