John Lafferty is John C. Malone
Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science
at Yale, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science.
Lafferty is an Associate Director of the Wu Tsai Institute
at Yale, a University-wide institute focused on the mission
of understanding human cognition and exploring human
potential by sparking interdisciplinary inquiry. He is
Director of the Center for Neurocomputation and Machine
Intelligence within the WTI. Lafferty’s most recent research
is driven by the goal of using computational modeling, in
particular machine learning, to gain insight into the
remarkable abilities of the human brain. This computational
lens can complement the specialized, biologically-grounded
studies of traditional experimental science and mechanistic
computational models. Lafferty’s research group develops
machine learning methodology together with theory that can
help explain the behavior of the underlying algorithms.
Heping Zhang, Ph.D. is Susan Dwight
Bliss Professor of Biostatistics, Professor in the Child
Study Center, Professor of Statistics and Data Science, and
Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive
Sciences, Yale University. He directs the Collaborative
Center for Statistics in Science that coordinates clinical
trials to evaluate treatment effectiveness for infertility.
He was named the 2008 Myrto Lefokopoulou distinguished
lecturer by Harvard School of Public Health and a Medallion
Award and Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics. He is a former-editor of the Journal of the
American Statistical Association - Applications and Case
Studies. He was the recipient of the 2022 Neyman Award and
Lecture by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the
2023 Distinguished Achievement Award by the International
Chinese Statistical Association. He was selected as a 2023
Highly Cited Researcher in cross field by Web of Science.
His research interests are to develop and apply statistical
methods in biomedical research including epidemiology,
genetics, mental health, cognition, and reproductive
medicine.
Dr. Zhang is a Ge Li and Ning Zhao
Professor of Statistics in The Wharton School at University
of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses primarily on the
development of statistical methods and computational
algorithms for the analysis of data from high-throughput
biological experiments. She has made contributions to copy
number and structural variant detection, to the modeling and
estimation of intra-tumor genetic heterogeneity, and to the
modeling and analysis of single-cell and spatial genomic
data. In Statistics, she has made contributions to
change-point analysis, variable selection, and model
selection. Dr. Zhang obtained her Ph.D. in Statistics in
2005 from Stanford University. After one year of
postdoctoral training at University of California, Berkeley,
she returned to the Department of Statistics at Stanford
University as Assistant Professor in 2006. She received the
Sloan Fellowship in 2011, and formally moved to University
of Pennsylvania with tenure in 2012. She was awarded the
Medallion Lectureship by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics in 2021 and the P.R. Krishnaiah Memorial
Lectureship in 2023. Her work has been funded by grants
from the NSF, NIH, and Mark Foundation. At Penn, she is a
member of the Abramson Cancer Center and the Graduate Group
in Genomics and Computational Biology, and Senior Fellow of
Institute of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Zhang currently
serves as the Vice Dean of the Wharton Doctoral Program.
Michael Lopez is a Senior Director of
Football Data and Analytics at the National Football League.
At the National Football League, his work centers on how to
use data to enhance and better understand the game of
football. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of
Quantitative Analysis in Sports, and has written for
FiveThirtyEight, Deadspin, Sports Illustrated, and Hockey
News. From 2014 through 2021, he worked at Skidmore College,
first as an Assistant Professor and then as a Lecturer and
Research Associate. In 2020, he was named the American
Statistical Association’s Statistics in Sports Significant
Contributor Award.