The Department of Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce new leadership for the upcoming academic year. Professor Yuguo Chen will serve as Interim Chair of the department for the 2024-2025 academic year, succeeding Professor Bo Li, who has held the position since 2019. Additionally, Professor Georgios Fellouris will take on the role of Associate Chair, replacing Professor Jeff Douglas, who has served in this capacity since 2019.
Professor Yuguo Chen is a distinguished member of the department and brings a wealth of expertise to the role. In addition to his position as Professor of Statistics at Illinois, he serves as the Director of the Illinois Statistics Office and holds affiliations with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Department of Computer Science, the Information Trust Institute, Computational Science and Engineering, and the Illinois Informatics Institute. Prior to joining the University of Illinois in 2005, Professor Chen was an Assistant Professor at Duke University’s Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University in 2001 and holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Professor Georgios Fellouris, an Associate Professor of Statistics at Illinois, will assume the role of Associate Chair. He has been with the department since 2013, first as an Assistant Professor and then as an Associate Professor since 2020. He is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to joining Illinois, Professor Fellouris was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. His educational background includes a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. in Statistics from Columbia University, as well as degrees in Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Modeling from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece.
The department is also excited to announce that Associate Professor Ruoqing Zhu will take over as Director of the Ph.D. Program, replacing Professor Xiaofeng Shao, who has held the position since 2016. Professor Zhu joined the Department of Statistics at Illinois in 2015 after completing his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has a broad range of interdisciplinary expertise, with research interests including personalized medicine, reinforcement learning, and survival analysis. In addition to his role within the department, Professor Zhu is an inaugural member of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, a former Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and is affiliated with the Center for Genomic Diagnostics and the Personalized Nutrition Initiative at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.
The department extends its deepest gratitude to Professors Bo Li, Jeff Douglas, and Xiaofeng Shao for their exemplary leadership and service over the past several years. Their contributions have been instrumental in advancing the department's academic mission and supporting the growth and success of its students and faculty.
As the department looks to the future, Professors Yuguo Chen, Georgios Fellouris, and Ruoqing Zhu bring strong academic backgrounds and innovative visions for guiding the department through the 2024-2025 academic year. Their leadership is anticipated to continue the department’s tradition of excellence in research, teaching, and service to the university community.