On July 27, 2026, Ph.D. student Xiaohui Yin successfully defended her thesis entitled “On Rare Event Modeling with Electronic Health Records.” The work was supported by multiple NIH grants on data-driven suicide prevention. Xiaohui has won multiple awards with her papers, including Student Paper Award from the Mental Health Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association in 2024 and Student Poster Award from the 39th New England Statistics Symposium in 2026. Xiaohui was advised by Dr. Kun Chen, and his committee also included Dr. Robert Aseltine, Dr. Ming-Hui Chen, and Dr. Jun Yan. Thank you all for your support!

After graduation, Xiaohui will join Yale University as a postdoc. Congratulations, Dr. Yin!

Kun Chen, Professor of Statistics, has been named Academic Director of UConn’s M.S. in Data Science program.

As Academic Director, Chen will provide intellectual and strategic leadership for the M.S. in Data Science program. He will work across UConn’s schools and colleges to guide the program’s academic direction, strengthen its curriculum, support faculty collaboration, enhance the student experience, deepen relationships with industry and external partners, and identify new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Chen’s appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the field. As data science and artificial intelligence rapidly converge, organizations increasingly need professionals who combine advanced analytical and AI capabilities with strong statistical foundations, ethical judgment, and deep domain expertise. Under Chen’s leadership, the program will build on its strengths in statistics, computing, machine learning, and applied problem-solving while expanding opportunities at the intersection of data science and artificial intelligence.

See detailed news from UConn Faculty/Staff Daily Digest.

Kun Chen has been elected to serve as President-Elect of the New England Statistical Society for 2026–2028.

It is a great honor to take on this role. Chen is grateful for the trust and support of the NESS membership and leadership, and looks forward to working with colleagues across academia, industry, and government to continue strengthening this vibrant statistical community.

On April 1o, 2026, Ph.D. student Xin Yang successfully defended his thesis entitled “Integrative Statistical Learning of Fluorescence Intensity and Lifetime Fluctuations in Quantum Dots.” The work was supported by a collaborative NSF grant with Dr. Jing Zhao from Chemistry.  His first paper won NESS Student Research Award in 2025.  Xin was advised by Dr. Kun Chen, and his committee also included Dr. Jing Zhao and Dr. Jun Yan. Thank you all for your support!

Congratulations, Dr. Yang!

On June 6, 2025, Ph.D. student Jing Wang successfully defended his thesis entitled “Optimal Subsampling Methods and their Applications for Rare-events and Transfer Learning.” Jing was co-advised by Dr. Kun Chen and Dr. HaiYing Wang, and his committee also included Dr. Ming-Hui Chen. Thank you all for your support!

After graduation, Jing will join Penn as a post-doc.

Congratulations, Dr. Wang!

Phd student Xin Yang has been selected as one of the winners of the 2025 NESS Student Paper Award, based on our joint work “Integrative Learning of Quantum Dot Intensity Fluctuations under Excitation via Tailored Dynamic Mixture Modeling.”

Congratulations, Xin!

On December 6, 2024, Ph.D. student Jiadong Fang successfully defended his thesis entitled “Quantile and Expectile Regression with Rare Feature Aggregation.” Jiadong was co-advised by Dr. Kun Chen and Dr. Yuwen Gu, and his committee also included Dr. HaiYing Wang. Thank you all for your support!

After graduation, Jiadong will join Abbvie as a statistician.

Congratulations, Dr. Fang!

 

Dr. Shane Sacco will join the Department of Medicine at the UConn School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2024. Shane has been with our group for three years as a Postdoc and has made great contributions. He has been doing excellent research, primarily focusing on suicide prevention and mental health research with large-scale medical data.

Congratulations, Shane! 

On July 10, 2024, Ph.D. student Jun (Bruce) Jin successfully defended his thesis entitled “On Large-Scale Transfer Learning with Heterogeneous Data.” Bruce’s committee consists of Drs. Robert Aseltine, Kun Chen,  and Jun Yan. Thank you all for your support!

After graduation, Bruce will join Henry Ford Health + Michigan State University Health Sciences (https://www.henryfordmsu.org/). 

Congratulations, Dr. Jin!

 

Our project, entitled “Coupling Risk Screening and Predictive Algorithms to Improve the Identification of Patients at Risk for Suicidal Behavior,” has been selected for funding through the 2024 Alan R. Bennett Public Health Policy Research opportunity. 

A generous contribution by a CLAS alumnus, Alan Bennett, provides resources for projects in an area of priority for the CLAS Strategic Plan: Public Health Policy Research.