Alum Victor De Oliveira elected Fellow of American Statistical Association

Alumnus Victor De Oliveira (Math Ph.D. 1997) has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association "for innovative and transformative methodological research in Bayesian spatial statistics and modeling non-Gaussian spatially dependent data, for significant contributions to environmental statistics, and for success in recruiting and supporting Hispanic STEM graduate students."

Fellows are chosen on the basis of their established reputations and outstanding contributions to statistical science. De Oliveira is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Statistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. At Maryland, he was advised by ISR-affiliated Professor Benjamin Kedem (Math).

De Oliveira’s research interests are in Bayesian methods; environmental statistics and geostatistics; Markov random fields; spatial prediction; and space-time modeling.

He has continued to work with Kedem through the years. In 2018, they collaborated on “Bayesian analysis of a density ratio model,” a paper that won the Canadian Journal of Statistics Award that year. The award is presented each year by the Statistical Society of Canada to the authors of an article published in the journal, in recognition of the outstanding quality of methodological innovation and presentation.

In 2017, they were two of the authors of Statistical Data Fusion, a book for graduate students, researchers, practitioners of statistics, engineers, scientists published by World Scientific. The third author is Michael Sverchkov of the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Mathematical Statistics Research Center.

Published April 14, 2021