Professor and Department Chair Yuguo Chen has been appointed a Robert W. Schaefer Professor in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The professorship honors the late Robert W. Schaefer (BS ’56, Chemical Engineering), a Illinois alumnus and longtime supporter of the university. After serving in the U.S. Navy, Schaefer joined Monsanto Company in St. Louis, where he was part of the team that introduced L-Dopa, a breakthrough treatment for Parkinson’s disease.
Chen is a professor of statistics and currently serves as chair of the Department of Statistics and director of the Illinois Statistics Office. He is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, Information Trust Institute, Computational Science and Engineering, and Illinois Informatics Institute.
His research spans Monte Carlo theory and methodology, statistical inference for network data, state space models and dynamic systems, and bioinformatics and population genetics. His scholarship includes more than 70 peer-reviewed publications, and he is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.