Wang Wins NSF Career Award

Huixia “Judy” Wang, assistant professor of statistics, has received an Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

Wang’s five-year, $400,000 grant will fund research related to her proposal, “A new and pragmatic framework for modeling and predicting conditional quantiles in data-sparse regions.” Through this work, Wang and her collaborators will seek to develop new theories and methods of modeling and predicting rare events with significant consequences. Unexpectedly heavy rainfall, large portfolio loss and dangerously low birth weight are just a few examples of the type of events that could be addressed.

The Career Award, intended to advance a scientist’s research and career, is one of the NSF’s highest honors for early-career university faculty in science and engineering. Wang is the 18th faculty member in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences to receive the honor. Four statistics faculty members have won a Career Award since 2004.

A native of Henan Province, China, Wang earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in statistics from Shanghai’s Fudan University before coming to the U.S. in 2002 to conduct doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After earning a Ph.D. in 2006, Wang joined the faculty of the NC State University Department of Statistics, where her research has focused on bioinformatics, quantile regression, measurement error, missing data, longitudinal data analysis, survival data analysis, empirical likelihood and extremes.