Focus on the Faculty

Dr. Jacqueline Hughes-Oliver

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We welcome a new faculty member to our staff this fall, Dr. Jacqueline Hughes-Oliver.

Dr. Hughes-Oliver grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, but during those early years she made regular visits to the states. In fact, every year she would spend approximately four months with her mother in Cincinnati, OH. At the age of fifteen, she finally moved to the US.

Upon entrance to the University of Cincinnati as an undergraduate, Dr. Hughes-Oliver decided to pursue a degree in mathematics. What she particularly enjoyed about math was that it seemed like the ideal topic to allow her to branch into many areas of specialization and application. So, when she learned about statistics as a junior, it seemed statistics would allow her to have an even greater diversity of exposures without having to leave the field of mathematics. Her life and work as a statistician began.

A few years later, while working on her dissertation at North Carolina State University, Dr. Hughes-Oliver focused her dissertation research in the area of group testing, where the goal is to design and analyze studies where testing is simultaneously applied to a collection of individuals/units/subject as opposed to separately testing each individual/unit/subject. The approach is still heavily used as a cost-effective strategy for medical testing in third-world countries.

In the years after she received her Ph.D., Dr. Hughes-Oliver’s research interests have remained very broad and diverse. Since 2000, her research has been sponsored by a number of agencies, including two National Science Foundation (NSF) awards for very different application areas, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) for yet a different application, and more recently the National Institutes of Health through the Roadmap Initiative. Her methodological research focuses on prediction and classification, variable and model selection with dimension reduction, design of experiments, and spatial modeling. Her application areas range from drug discovery to engineering manufacturing, to environmental modeling, to transportation modeling, and even to genomics and metabolomics.

When Dr. Hughes-Oliver is not hard at work with research and being a professor, she enjoys doing crafts, working in the yard, or doing some home remodeling. She also loves spending time with her husband Rod, their two children, Cherice and Marcus, and the family dog, Mystic.

Please visit Dr. Hughes-Oliver’s faculty page for more information.