Teresa M. Donnellan

Associate Professor Kenneth Strazzeri's innovative teaching methods and curriculum tweaks significantly improved student engagement and success in George Mason University's STAT 250 course, resulting in an impressive 80% attendance rate across its sections and a strong foundation in statistical concepts for nearly one thousand students each semester.

Nicholas Rios and Abolfazl Safikhani revamped a Department of Statistics student seminar series to better prepare students for professional success, focusing on such topics as public speaking, resume building, and searching for internships. 

By developing a new machine learning algorithm to apply variational inference to spatial statistics, Jin Hyung Lee has significantly improved high-dimensional data analysis efficiency and accuracy. The PhD candidate in the Department of Statistics received the 2024 Korean International Statistical Society Outstanding Student Paper Award for his work.

While working full-time in Northern Virginia as a consultant in technology, management, and marketing analysis for over a decade, Tigran Markaryan has also been teaching statistics at George Mason University as an adjunct professor. 

Aminat Gbadamosi loves how statistics appear in so much academic research, and she looks forward to contributing to students’ lives at George Mason. 

The Department of Statistics’ Lily Wang and George Washington University’s Huixia Judy Wang are developing scalable, distributed computing methods to analyze large-scale spatiotemporal datasets. The collaborative research project is funded by the National Science Foundation.  

In the quest to combat Alzheimer's disease, George Mason professor Abolfazl Safikhani is working with neuroscientists and imaging experts at the University of Washington’s Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) to pioneer groundbreaking advancements in biomarker identification. 

In two recent research projects, George Mason statistics professor Abolfazl Safikhani has applied machine learning tools to time series analysis of land use and real estate pricing to help decision-makers in urban planning and real estate.  

A postdoc program for health researchers interested in statistics and data science, run jointly by George Mason’s statistics and global and community health departments, with mentors from Mason and Inova Health, has developed from the ongoing partnership between Inova Health and George Mason’s Statistics Collaboration Core. Mohamad Bahij Moumneh, MD, and Jason F. Goldberg, MD, are the program’s standing inaugural members.

At the 2023 Joint Statistics Meeting, one of the largest statistics events in the world, George Mason’s statistics department teamed up with Georgetown’s data science department and George Washington’s statistics department to co-host the first Georges Reception. Students, alumni, faculty, and friends gathered to network with fellow DC area locals.