What’s the latest in: Research

Una-May O’Reilly

Una-May O’Reilly is leader and Principal Research Scientist of the AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ALFA focuses on scalable machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, and frameworks for large scale knowledge mining, prediction and analytics.  The group has projects in clinical medicine knowledge discovery, cyber security and MOOC technology.  She received the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe in 2013. She is a Junior Fellow (elected before age 40) of the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, now ACM Sig-EVO. She now serves as Vice-Chair of ACM SigEVO. She served as chair of the largest international Evolutionary Computation Conference,  GECCO, in 2005.  She has served on the GECCO business committee, co-led the 2006 and 2009 Genetic Programming: Theory to Practice Workshops and co-chaired EuroGP, the largest conference devoted to Genetic Programming. In 2013 she inaugurated the Women in Evolutionary Computation group at GECCO. She is the area editor for Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery for Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Kluwer), and editor for Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), and action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. At ICAIL 2015 she co-authored the Peter Jackson Best Innovative Application paper. At EMBC 2016, she co-authored the paper awarded NSF Best paper.

Laura Cadonati

Laura Cadonati is a gravitational wave astrophysicist, member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech. She has been a widely-recognized leader in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in the years preparing for and including the discovery of gravitational waves, the most elusive prediction of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Cadonati’s research focuses on the detection, characterization and astrophysical interpretation of short-duration gravitational wave signals that are produced by cataclysmic astrophysical events such as the collisions of black holes or core collapse supernovae. She received her undergraduate degree in Italy, with a Laurea in Physics at the University of Milano, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, past-chair for the Division of Gravity of the American Physical Society, she is deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and was awarded an NSF Career Award.

Krista Gile

Krista Gile is Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Her research focuses on developing statistical methodology for social and behavioral science research, particularly related to making inference from partially-observed social network structures. Most of her current work is focused on understanding the strengths and limitations of data sampled with link-tracing designs such as snowball sampling, contact tracing, and respondent-driven sampling.

Raji Balasubramanian is Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. Her research into the development and application of novel statistical techniques is motivated by collaborations with medical researchers, with a focus on Women’s Health. Her work includes developing statistical models that incorporate outcomes measured with error, motivated by data collected in large epidemiologic cohorts and electronic medical databases. Her work also involves methods for biomarker discovery and network estimation, with application to genomic and metabolomic studies of complex disorders. She has a B.A. in Mathematical Sciences from Mount Holyoke College, and a Sc.D in Biostatistics from Harvard University. Selections of her work can be found here.

What’s the latest in: Industry

Monika Wahi

Monika M. Wahi, MPH, CPH, serves as President of DethWench Professional Services, a public health education and consulting firm, and Lecturer at Laboure College, a health sciences college in Milton, Massachusetts. She has over 20 years of experience in epidemiology, biostastistics, and informatics, and has been using R since the S-Plus days. Having co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications, her newest work is a recently published book by Taylor & Francis titled, “Analyzing Health Data in R for SAS Users.” For fun, she loves walking on Boston’s Esplanade and playing turn-based adventure games.

Melinda Han Williams

Melinda Han Williams is the VP of Data Science and Analytics at Dstillery. Before joining the ad tech industry, Melinda worked as a physicist developing third generation photovoltaics and studying electronic transport in nanostructured graphene devices. Her peer-reviewed journal publications have been cited over 5,000 times. Melinda holds bachelor’s degrees in Applied Math and Engineering Physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and earned her Ph.D. in Applied Physics with distinction from Columbia University, where she held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

What’s the latest in: Education

Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel

Mine is Professional Educator at RStudio and Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Her work focuses on innovation in statistics pedagogy, with an emphasis on computation, reproducible research, open-source education, and student-centered learning. She is the author of three open-source introductory statistics textbooks as part of the OpenIntro project and teaches the popular Statistics with R MOOC on Coursera.