Florentina Bunea, professor of statistics and data science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, delivered the 2026 Puri Memorial Lecture at Purdue University on April 24.
A pioneer in statistical inference, Bunea is the 13th statistics pioneer to give the Puri Memorial Lecture, established in 1993 in honor of Prem S. Puri, an esteemed statistics professor at Purdue.
As an additional contribution to her field, Bunea is a co-organizer of an upcoming Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) conference called Statistics Foundations of Generative Modeling: Theory, Evaluation, and Applications, which will be held October 5-9 in Chicago. She will also present her talk, “BabyTransformer CODL learns latent domains.”