About Me

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, mainly Seattle and surrounding area. As an undergrad at the University of Washington I studied Mathematics and Computer Science. After graduating from UW, I completed a masters degree in Mathematics at Western Washington University in beautiful Bellingham, WA. I am currently a Ph.D. student in Statistics at Iowa State University in Ames, IA working under the direction of Dr. Zhengyuan Zhu and Dr. Petrutza Caragea. My main areas of research are in spatial statistics, functional data analysis and their intersection--spatially varying functional data. Iowa State University has a large Statistics department with a rich history in statistical research going back to George Snedecor who developed the first statistical laboratory in the country.

The difference between Math and Statistics

"Statistics is the science of collecting and interpreting data. Dealing with uncertainty is a cornerstone of the the statistical method, and distinguishes it from the mathematical method. The mathematical method is deductive: its concern is the logical derivation of consequences from explicitly stated assumptions. The Statistical method is inferential: given empirical evidence in the form of data, its goal is to ask what underlying natural laws could have generated the data; and it is the imprecision or uncertainty in the data which makes the inferential process fundamentally different from mathematical deduction."

- from "Statistics and Scientific Method"