FSU statistics professor named 2020 American Statistical Association Fellow

A Florida State University faculty member has been named a 2020 Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Yiyuan She, professor and assistant undergraduate adviser in the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was selected by the ASA in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of statistical science.

“Being elected as an ASA fellow is an honor for any statistician,” he said. “It means that my contributions and service to the profession are well acknowledged by ASA.”

The American Statistical Association strives for the development, application and dissemination of statistical science through meetings, publications, membership services, education, accreditation and advocacy. Founded in Boston in 1839, the ASA is the second-oldest, continuously operating professional association in the U.S. With more than 19,000 professionals in academia, government, research and business, the ASA is also the world’s largest community of statisticians.

Each year, the ASA’s Committee on Fellows elects less than one-third of one percent of the association’s total membership as fellows.

“I sincerely appreciate the ASA’s recognition of my research, activities and accomplishments in the past,” Professor She said. “It is a new start of my career as a statistician.”

Professor She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Beijing’s Peking University before attending Stanford, where he received his doctorate in statistics. In 2008, he came to Florida State as an assistant professor of statistics and was promoted to professor in 2018. He was a National Science Foundation CAREER award winner and a developing scholar at FSU and has an extensive list of journal citations to his name, spanning a wide variety of statistical research topics.

“I have broad research interests in high dimensional statistics, machine learning, robust statistics, optimization, signal processing and others,” he said. “I love both theory and computation. One topic I am working on is statistical learning and inference on multivariate data with dependencies and low-dimensional structures.”

Xu-Feng Niu, chair of the Department of Statistics, said She not only established himself as a leader, but as an innovator in the field of high dimensional statistics, statistical machine learning, optimization and network science.

“Dr. She is so deserving of the honor and title of being named an ASA fellow,” Niu said. “The department and I are very proud of his achievements. We are looking forward to seeing him make even more significant contributions to the statistical profession.”

Professor She credits the positive and collaborative environment cultivated in the statistics department as vital to his career successes, including his designation as an ASA Fellow.

“I would like to thank my department and colleagues, Professor Debajyoti Sinha, in particular, for consistent support and encouragement,” he said. “The more senior people have created an extremely friendly and healthy environment for statisticians and biostatisticians to work together and to be creative and productive.”