The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is pleased to announce Edgar Dobriban as the 2024 IMS Hall Prize recipient. Edgar Dobriban is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science, with secondary appointment in Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania. His prize citation reads, “For deep, fundamental, and wide-ranging contributions to mathematical statistics and statistical machine learning, including high-dimensional asymptotics (ridge regression, PCA), multiple testing, randomization tests, scalable statistical learning via random projections and distributed learning, uncertainty quantification for machine learning (calibration, prediction sets), robustness, fairness, and Covid-19 pooled testing via hypergraph factorization.”

On hearing of the award, Edgar said, “I am incredibly honored and humbled to receive the Peter Gavin Hall IMS Early Career Prize. Peter Hall’s work is truly legendary and inspiring, and it’s wonderful to contribute to honoring his legacy.”

His research interests include the statistical analysis of large-scale data, including dimension reduction and high-dimensional statistics, and the theoretical foundations of machine learning, including uncertainty quantification, the use of symmetry, and fairness, among other topics.

Among his honors and awards, last year alone he received the ICSA Outstanding Young Researcher Award, for “remarkable contributions to contemporary statistical and machine learning theory and methods”; the Army Research Office’s Early Career Program Award; the COPSS Emerging Leader Award; a Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics; and a Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award.

Edgar received his BA in Mathematics (summa cum laude) from Princeton University in 2012, an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2015, and a PhD in Statistics from Stanford in 2017, advised by David Donoho. His doctoral thesis won the Theodore W. Anderson Award for the best thesis in theoretical statistics from Stanford’s Department of Statistics. Edgar grew up in Romania, and speaks Hungarian as a first language (the real spelling of his name is Dobribán Edgár).

Peter Hall (1951–2016) played a significant role throughout his professional career in mentoring young colleagues at work and through professional society activities. In his honor, the prize was set up to recognize early-career research accomplishments and research promise in statistics, broadly construed. The award consists of a plaque and a cash honorarium of $2500.