Rice University Statistics

🦉🎓 Congratulations to our Rice Statistics Class of 2026!

Last week, we celebrated our graduates surrounded by the faculty and staff who cheered them on every step of the way. From the Order of the Engineer ceremony to our department reception, this was a week to remember.

We are so proud of this group and we can't wait to see what you accomplish next.
Welcome to the Rice Engineering Alumni family!

José Palacio, a doctoral student in the Department of Statistics at Rice University, has been named one of the winners of the JSM- The American Statistical Association 2026 Health Policy Statistics Section Student Paper Competition.

His paper, "Inferring Transmission Dynamics of RSV from Houston Wastewater Data," applies a Bayesian renewal model to weekly wastewater surveillance data to generate stable, interpretable estimates of RSV community transmission — demonstrating how wastewater-based epidemiology can support public health monitoring and response.

Palacio will present his research at an HPSS-organized session at JSM and will be recognized at the awards ceremony on August 3.
👏 Congratulations, José!

New research from Rice Statistics takes on a question scientists have debated for decades: Does climate variability increase the risk of armed conflict?

Statistics doctoral student Tyler Bagwell, working alongside statistician Frederi Viens and climate scientist Sylvia Dee, built a first-of-its-kind high-resolution dataset to examine how large-scale climate patterns shift the probability of civil conflict and war. The study finds that El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole can act as threat multipliers — with drought-affected regions showing the strongest connection to elevated conflict risk.

Because these climate patterns can be predicted months in advance, the findings could support early warning systems worldwide. Published in the PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research emerged from a Rice Faculty Initiatives grant designed to bridge statistics, climate science and political science.https://news.rice.edu/news/2026/climate-patterns-may-shape-where-violent-conflict-risks-are-amplified-rice-study-finds

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released a landmark roadmap for U.S. statistical science through 2035. The consensus study, chaired by Professor Katherine Ensor, provides strategic vision and practical recommendations for how the field must evolve to keep America at the forefront of scientific discovery and innovation.

Read the full story: https://statistics.rice.edu/news/national-academies-unveil-roadmap-us-statistical-science-through-2035

Congratulations to Arya Muralidharan, a graduate student in the Department of Statistics, on receiving the Graduate Teaching Award for Course Support from Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence!

This award recognizes graduate students for their substantive contributions to course design and delivery — from shaping syllabi and assignments to developing online tutorials and in-class activities. Arya's dedication to the learning experience of Rice undergraduates reflects the department's commitment to excellence in education.

Read more: https://news.rice.edu/news/2026/faculty-staff-students-honored-excellence-teaching-mentoring-service

Rice University Statistics welcomes Dr. Kun Meng, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Florida State University, for our colloquium series presenting "Principal Manifold Estimation, from Theory to Applications."

Dr. Meng will present a unified view of principal manifold estimation, which provides nonlinear, low-dimensional summaries of high-dimensional data. The talk will cover an optimization-based framework balancing data fidelity with geometric regularity, recent theoretical advances placing estimation on Riemannian template manifolds, and extensions to longitudinal settings where manifolds evolve over time—yielding coherent trajectories and improved statistical efficiency.

📅 Monday, April 20, 2026
⏰ 4:00 PM
📍 Maxfield Hall Room 251, Rice University
https://lnkd.in/g6vymAJJ

Join us for the Statistics Colloquium featuring Dr. Yueyang Liu, Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, presenting "A Definition of Non-Stationary Bandits."

Dr. Liu will address how prior work's characterization of non-stationary bandits creates classification ambiguity in the Bayesian setting, where different choices of underlying distribution sequences can yield conflicting results. She will introduce a new definition that eliminates this ambiguity by making no reference to any latent sequence, and propose axiomatic criteria for evaluating key components of the bandit learning framework.

📅 Monday, April 13, 2026
⏰ 4:00 PM
📍 Maxfield Hall Room 251, Rice University

https://events.rice.edu/statistics/event/424085-statistics-colloquium-yueyang-liu-rice-business

Join us for our end-of-year Poster Session and Luncheon, hosted in collaboration with our ASA Student Chapter!

This is a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the Rice Statistics community and see the exciting research happening in our department. Undergraduate, master's, and PhD students will present their work and compete for top poster awards at each level.

We are also looking for alumni to serve as judges, as your field perspective would be incredibly valuable to our students. Simply select the judge option in the registration form.

We hope to see you there!
📅 Tuesday, April 21, 2026
🕦 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
📍 O'Connor Building, 5th Floor
Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5mcXRfGLRgvMl3ve_KmcsWEqablpbaa14Hp8oe_0JOCgnmw/viewform

For more than a decade, Rice University Statistics Professor Frederi Viens has been studying Lake Chad, a body of water that much of the world believes is disappearing, but his data tells a different story.

Viens' team doesn't just analyze existing numbers. They build original datasets from the ground up, through soil sampling, community surveys and fieldwork in northeastern Nigeria conducted alongside academic partners at the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID). The research focuses on the livelihoods of crop farmers, pastoralist herders and fishing communities whose economic stability is deeply tied to water availability and climate patterns.

In one of Africa’s most studied environmental crises, Rice team collecting and analyzing missing data For more than a decade, Rice’s Frederi Viens has been studying Lake Chad, a vast freshwater lake in west-central Africa that borders Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon.