Congratulations to PhD student Rui Mao on receiving the IMS Hannan Graduate Student Travel Award!
The Hannan Graduate travel awards by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics are awarded to IMS members who are graduate students studying some area of statistical science or probability. The funds are meant for travel and registration, to attend and possibly present a paper or a poster at an IMS sponsored or co-sponsored meeting. Through an application process that includes a summary of the paper to be presented and a CV, as well as two letters of recommendation, awardees are selected based on the strength of their application.
Rui is a direct-entry PhD student, entering the DOSS PhD program in Fall 2018. Rui’s research paper, ‘Adaptive Resistant Regression,’ is co-authored with her supervisor, Assistant Professor Qiang Sun at the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto and Assistant Professor Wei-Xin Zhou from the Department of Mathematics, University of California, San Diego. In their paper, they propose the resistant regression with an adaptively growing robustification parameter; hence the name: adaptive resistant regression. The key observation is that, by taking the resistant parameter in a proper order, the proposed estimator automatically achieves high accuracy and high efficiency.
Due to the current travel restrictions imposed by COVID-19, Rui is free to use the award to attend any IMS co-sponsored meeting between now and December 31, 2022.