Graduates in Statistical Graphics Research at ISU 2015

Its exciting to report on the graduations from the working group this year.

• Niladri Roy Chowdhury defended his PhD thesis in Aug 2014, titled “Explorations of the lineup protocol for visual inference: application to high dimension, low sample size problems and metrics to assess the quality”, under my direction. He is a scientist at Novartis, Boston, MA.
• Susan Vanderplas defended her PhD in May, titled “Perception in Statistical Graphics”, under the direction of Professor Heike Hofmann. Susan will be working for Nebraska power in the next couple of years, while continuing statistical research with colleagues at ISU. Personal logistics meant she had to turn down an assistant professor position at University of Iowa this year, but she hopes to move in to academia in several years, if their dual careers allow.
  
• Xiaoyue (Zoe) Cheng defended her thesis titled “Interactive Visualization for Missing Values, Time Series, and Areal Data” under the direction of myself, and Heike. She will be an assistant professor at University of Nebraska-Omaha from August, and is welcoming a new member into the family in just a couple of weeks.
• Karsten Maurer will defend his PhD late this summer, and will start as an assistant professor at Miami University, Ohio in August.
• Sam Helmich defended his MS in March, titled “Board Game Recommendation” under the direction of Professor Heike Hofmann. He works for John Deere, Iowa.
• Sam Tyner defended her MS in April, titled “A Geometry for Network Visualization in ggplot2” under the direction of Professor Heike Hofmann. She will continue on to a PhD at ISU.
• Danny Bero defended his MS, titled “Ranking Iowa High School Soccer Teams”, in April, under my direction. You can check out the web app to explore rankings of high school teams, and predict match outcomes. He will take a position at an internet sales company in Monroe, WI, in June.

Congratulations on the hard, and creative work!

Below are some photos from the spring barbecue celebrating the graduation, and the graduation photos. (Some of the people at the bbq: Ian, Lari, Alex, Andee, Cari, Vianey, Natalia, Ignacio, Eric, Rainie, Heike, Mattias, Grace.)