Yuan Jiang, Armeen Taeb, and Pragya Sur report:

The 24th Meeting of New Researchers in Statistics and Probability (NRC) convened at Oregon State University from July 31 to August 3, 2024: see https://nrc2024.github.io/index. The conference was attended by 68 emerging researchers and 14 senior speakers and panelists, hailing from the United States, Canada, China, Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

The conference kicked off on Wednesday with a relaxed evening where attendees mingled and bowled. The scientific program on Thursday spotlighted a plenary talk by the Tweedie Award recipient, Chengchun Shi, who spoke about statistical inference in reinforcement learning. The day was further enriched by two-minute flash talks from junior attendees, followed by a poster session. Notably, all the senior faculty were impressed by the breadth and depth of the work done by junior attendees and were very optimistic about the future of statistics. We then had a short senior talk by Jeffrey Leek, who discussed post-prediction inference and stressed the importance of having fun while conducting research. We ended the day with our first panel discussion on mentoring, led by Genevera Allen, Eleanor Feingold, Jeffrey Leek, and Adrian Raftery, with the session moderated by junior attendee Nikos Ignatiadis. On Thursday evening, participants enjoyed the gift of time, with many of them going to the downtown area for a relaxing evening together.

Friday was filled with invited talks and panel discussions. The first set of talks was by Richard Samworth, Ji Zhu, and Adrian Raftery. Richard spoke about optimal convex M-estimation via score matching; Ji Zhu talked about statistical inference for networks; and Adrian Raftery discussed Bayesian population projections, underscoring the importance of statistics in scientific understanding and encouraging the junior attendees to find interesting application areas. The morning session ended with a panel on funding, led by NSF program officer Tapabrata Maiti and NIH Scientific Review Officer Victoriya Volkova, with Heping Zhang and Liza Levina sharing their experiences and lessons, while junior attendee Fei Xue moderated the session. The afternoon session began with talks by Heping Zhang, Xihong Lin, and Jean Yang. Heping spoke about estimating multiple genetic effects and shared his perspective of being a new researcher; Xihong encouraged junior attendees to be open-minded about integrating statistics, AI, and domain sciences in their research; and Jean spoke about collaborative research with biologists. The afternoon session concluded with a panel on publishing, led by Genevera Allen, Richard Samworth, Tian Zheng, Ji Zhu, and Adrian Raftery, moderated by Dan Kessler. The publishing panel facilitated a dynamic dialogue with editors from top statistical journals. Friday evening treated the attendees to a banquet, highlighted by an enlightening speech from New Researcher Group president Pragya Sur, followed by fun short speeches from some senior attendees.

The final day of the conference began with a series of talks by Genevera Allen and Tian Zheng. Genevera spoke about how one of her research threads started with a neuroscience collaboration and led to multiple papers on statistical methodology in unsupervised statistical learning. Tian Zheng discussed the role of statistics in climate science and offered valuable advice to junior attendees. The morning also included two panel sessions: one on collaboration and another on the future of statistics. The collaboration panel was led by Xihong Lin, Adrian Raftery, Jean Yang, Heping Zhang, and Ji Zhu, and was moderated by Hengrui Cai. The Future of Statistics panel was led by Liza Levina, Xihong Lin, Richard Samworth, and Tian Zheng, and moderated by Song Mei.

This year’s meeting was co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and Oregon State University. Moreover, we benefited from the generous administrative support of the Department of Statistics and College of Science at Oregon State University.