Congratulations to Jiaming Qiu, Matt Stuart, and Yifan Zhu, winners of Research Excellence Awards this fall. Quoting from the Graduate College website: "The purpose of these awards is to recognize graduate students for outstanding research accomplishments as documented in their theses and dissertations. These students are also expected to be academically superior and able not only to do research, but also to develop a well-written product. The intent of this program is to recognize "the best of the best" graduating students who have submitted theses and dissertations."
Research excellence awards consist of
- a letter of commendation from the ISU President,
- a certificate of achievement signed by the ISU President and the Graduate College Dean,
- an honor cord to be worn at commencement, and
- an official notation on the student’s transcript.
Jiaming Qiu is jointly advised by Assistant Professor Xiongtao Dai and Professor Zhengyuan Zhu. He was selected for his work on nonparametric estimation of repeated densities with heterogeneous sample sizes, spatial prediction of soil erosion distributions using Wasserstein geometry, and metric estimation for Riemannian manifold-valued data.
Matt Stuart is advised by Professor Cindy Yu. Matt was selected for his work in survey statistics to alleviate the burden of lengthy questionnaires, research on financial modeling of cryptocurrency stocks, and research on estimating the premium price of crop insurance based on estimation of the joint density of crop yield and price.
Yifan Zhu, advised by Professor Ranjan Maitra, was selected for developing novel statistical methodology to assess dependence between ordinal random variables and his innovative integration of computational and mathematical techniques to make three-dimensional radial visualization possible (RadViz3D), which he used to display the evolution of celadon ceramics and their imitation through Chinese history and the 2021 surge of the Covid-19 Delta variant across the US.