St. Lawrence faculty present at Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM)
Four St. Lawrence faculty members traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to present research and pedagogical work in statistics and data science.
Drs. Matt Higham, Lillian Li, Patti Frazer Lock, and Robin Lock joined former St. Lawrence faculty member Dr. Michael Schuckers and St. Lawrence alum Josh Marvald (‘21) at the largest statistics conference in the United States, the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), in Nashville, Tennessee from August 3 to August 7.
Photo: From left to right, Drs. Michael Schuckers (UNC), Matt Higham, Patti Frazer Lock, and Robin Lock at the JSM conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
Josh Marvald (‘21), a statistics and mathematics double major in the class of 2021, presented a poster on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees with applications in the biomedical sciences. He is currently a PhD student in biostatistics at the University of Rochester specializing in Bayesian and machine learning methods. Josh plans to defend his PhD dissertation in October of this year.
Photo: Josh Marvald (‘21) presents his poster on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees with Basis-Expanded Functional Covariates. Marvald majored in statistics and mathematics at St. Lawrence University and is currently a biostatistics PhD student at the University of Rochester.
Dr. Robin Lock spoke on “A SCORE Module for Inference Review Based on NFL Scores and Point Spreads” which arises from the NSF-funded Sport Content for Outreach, Research, and Education program at St. Lawrence. This teaching module uses a dataset of scores and point spreads from NFL games to motivate a list of 20 questions that students can use to practice identifying the appropriate statistical technique to address each question.
Dr. Patti Frazer Lock served as Organizer and Chair of an invited panel presentation on “Redefining Introductory Statistics in the Age of AI: Perspectives from Academe, Industry, and Government.” The six panelists included both the current president and a past president of the American Statistical Association and ChatGPT as a panelist.
Dr. Patti Frazer Lock also was a co-presenter of a contributed talk on “Combining Statistics and Data Science in the New GAISE College Report.”
Dr. Matt Higham discussed different types of foundational data science courses as a panelist at a session titled “Data Science 101: Why Do So Many Versions of this Course Exist?” Dr. Higham presented on St. Lawrence’s DATA/STAT 234 course, which introduces students to foundational data science concepts through the statistical software language R.