The IMS has selected Po-Ling Loh as the winner of this year’s Tweedie New Researcher Award. Po-Ling is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with secondary appointments in the Department of Computer Sciences and the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.

The IMS Travel Awards Committee selected Po-Ling for “novel contributions in non-convex optimization, robust statistics, and statistical modeling and inference of random graphs and networks.”

Po-Ling received her PhD in 2014 from the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Martin Wainwright, and before that, her MS in Computer Science in 2013; her BS in Mathematics was from California Institute of Technology in 2009. She says her research interests include high-dimensional statistics, optimization, network inference, and robust statistics; she is also interested in statistical applications to medical imaging and epidemiology. including exact distribution theory, stochastic control, optimal stopping, mathematical finance and statistical inference for stochastic processes.

Po-Ling will present the Tweedie New Researcher Invited Lecture at the IMS New Researchers Conference, held this year in Fort Collins, Colorado from July 24–27 (immediately before JSM Denver). She plans to speak about some of her work on statistical modeling of stochastic spreads on networks.

The Tweedie award is named for Richard L. Tweedie (1947–2001), the Australian-born professor of biostatistics and head of the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota, who mentored many young colleagues at work and through professional society activities.