This fall, the Department of Statistics is thrilled to welcome four outstanding new members to its growing faculty, including one tenured professor and three assistant professors. Research interests among the new faculty are diverse, reflecting the broad range of interdisciplinary applications of statistical methods.
Read on to learn more about all of the new faculty members, and keep an eye out for future updates on their work.
Matthias Katzfuss
Professor Matthias Katzfuss joins UW–Madison after spending a decade on the faculty at Texas A&M University. Katzfuss conducts interdisciplinary research related to computational spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, Gaussian processes, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation. He has collaborated with scholars across a range of fields on projects exploring satellite remote sensing, tornado forecasting, agriculture, pollutant monitoring, and climate science.
Katzfuss has earned numerous accolades, including an NSF Career Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Early Investigator Award by the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and the Environment. He earned his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2011.
Outside of work: Katzfuss enjoys exploring Madison, especially the lakes, cultural amenities, and dining scene.
Yongyi Guo
Assistant Professor Yongyi Guo comes to the Department of Statistics as an assistant professor after holding a postdoctoral researcher position in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. Her work encompasses various areas, including statistical reinforcement learning, distributed learning, experimental causal inference, and high-dimensional statistics.
Guo is passionate about applying statistical techniques to healthcare, including through micro-randomized clinical trials, in which participants are randomized hundreds or thousands of times over the course of the study to better assess the causal impact of health interventions. Guo completed her Ph.D. in Statistics at Princeton University in 2022.
Outside of work: Guo enjoys playing the accordion.
Chris Geoga
Assistant Professor Chris Geoga joins UW–Madison Statistics after finishing his PhD at Rutgers University in the summer of 2023. Geoga previously worked at Argonne National Laboratory, as an assistant computational mathematician in the Math and Computer Science Division. His work focuses on modeling complex dependence structure in spatial and spatio-temporal data, particularly in the physical sciences.
Geoga has worked closely with environmental scientists and is interested in developing collaborative ties with astronomers and astro-statisticians at UW–Madison. In addition to his PhD, he holds bachelor’s degrees in Statistics and Mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Outside of work: Geoga is a rock climber and jazz enthusiast.
Rishabh Dudeja
Assistant Professor Rishabh Dudeja is joining the Department of Statistics after serving as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. Dudeja’s research interests lie at the intersection of high-dimensional statistics and applied probability. He is particularly interested in understanding phase transitions, universality phenomena, and computational-statistical trade-offs in modern high-dimensional inference problems. Dudeja is particularly interested in applying these concepts to problems in statistical physics.
Outside of work: Dudeja enjoys biking all around Madison.
The Department of Statistics is thrilled to welcome these four renowned scholars to its faculty.
Explore the complete list of faculty in the Department of Statistics.