Stats + Stories

Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, is well known for his depth and breadth in research, his innovation and passion in pedagogy, his vision and effectiveness in administration, as well as for his engaging and entertaining style as a speaker and writer. Meng was named the best statistician under the age of 40 by COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) in 2001, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his more than 150 publications in at least a dozen theoretical and methodological areas, as well as in areas of pedagogy and professional development.

Stephen T. Ziliak is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University and Conjoint Professor of Business and Law at the University of Newcastle-Australia. A major contributor to the American Statistical Association “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values” (2016) he is probably best known for his book (with Deirdre N. McCloskey) on The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008), showing the damage done by a culture of mindless significance testing, the history of wrong turns, and the benefits which could be enjoyed by returning to Bayesian and Guinnessometric roots.

Siddharth Suri is a computational social scientist whose research interests lie at the intersection of computer science, behavioral economics, and crowdsourcing. His current work centers around the crowd workers who power many modern apps, websites, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This work culminated in a book he coauthored with Mary L. Gray titled Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (May 2019).

Libby Pier is the Research Manager at Education Analytics, overseeing and executing EA's diverse educational research portfolio, encompassing social-emotional learning, predictive analytics, academic growth measures, human capital analytics, and program evaluation. Nichole Webster is a research analyst at Education Analytics. She examines the item properties and performance of Social and Emotional Learning surveys and estimates teacher and school performance metrics in R. She’s part of ongoing research that examines how Item Response Theory models estimate error. She studied Mathematics and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin

Yoav Benjamini is the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University. He is a co-developer of the widely used and cited False Discovery Rate concept and methodology. He received the Israel Prize for research in Statistics and Economics, is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and has been elected to receive the Karl Pearson Prize of ISI this summer.

Nichole Webster is a research analyst at Education Analytics. She examines the item properties and performance of Social and Emotional Learning surveys and estimates teacher and school performance metrics in R. She’s part of ongoing research that examines how Item Response Theory models estimate error. She studied Mathematics and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin Libby Pier is the Research Manager at Education Analytics, overseeing and executing EA's diverse educational research portfolio, encompassing social-emotional learning, predictive analytics, academic growth measures, human capital analytics, and program evaluation. Prior to joining EA, Libby worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison's Center for Women's Health Research. She earned her PhD in Educational Psychology (Learning Sciences) with a focus on quantitative methods from UW-Madison in 2017, and a Master's in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount in 2010. Libby served as an 8th, 9th, and 10th grade English teacher in Los Angeles in both a traditional public school and a charter school through Teach For America.

Dr. Jane Paik Kim is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her professional aim is to improve public mental health through the application and development of statistical methods in mental health research. Her research interests are statistical methods for digital health interventions delivered through mobile or wearable devices, and psychiatric ethics research. Her statistical interest areas are in the robustness of regression-based inference for both clinical trials and observational studies, as well as methods development for survival data arising from non-standard biased sampling schemes.

John Bailer is “the stats guy” and co-creator of Stats+Stories. He is also University Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Statistics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is currently President-elect of the International Statistical Institute and previously served on the previously on the ASA Board of Directors. His scholarly interests include the design and analysis of environmental toxicology experiments and occupational health studies, quantitative risk estimation, gerontological data analysis, promoting quantitative literacy and enhancing connections between statistics and journalism.

Brian McDonald is currently the Director of Sports Analytics in the Stats & Information Group at ESPN. He was previously the Director of Hockey Analytics with the Florida Panthers Hockey Club, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at West Point, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Management Science at the University of Miami, and an Adjunct Professor in Sports Analytics in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, Easton, PA, and a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Michael Schuckers is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Statistics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. An applied statistician he has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Homeland Security. He is the author of over three dozen publications including Computational Methods for Biometric Authentication (Springer, 2010). Additionally, Schuckers has done work in sports analytics particularly ice hockey including consulting with a MLB team and an NHL team. For his work in this area, he was named a American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Sports "Significant Contributor". In 2013-14, he was a Fulbright Scholar via the Fulbright-VTT Grant in Science, Technology and Innovation in Espoo, Finland. Schuckers obtained his Bachelor's degree from Penn State, a Master's from the University of Michigan and a Doctorate in Statistics from Iowa State University.