Rina Foygel Barber

The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) sponsors and presents the COPSS Presidents’ Award annually to a young member of the statistical community in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. The 2020 COPSS Presidents’ Award was announced at the Virtual JSM to Rina Foygel Barber, University of Chicago: “For fundamental contributions to statistical sparsity and selective inference in high-dimensional problems, for the creative and novel knockoff filter to cope with correlated coefficients, for contributions to compressed sensing, the jackknife, and conformal predictive inference; for the encouragement and training of graduate and undergraduate students.”

Rina, who is also this year’s IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize winner (and who won the IMS Tweedie Award in 2017), says her research interests are in “developing and analyzing estimation, inference, and optimization tools for structured high-dimensional data problems such as sparse regression, sparse nonparametric models, and low-rank models. I work on developing methods for false discovery rate control in settings where we may have under-sampled data or misspecified models, and for scalable optimization techniques for nonconvex problems. I also collaborate on modeling and optimization problems in image reconstruction for medical imaging.”