Department Directory

Yang Ning is an associate professor of statistics and data science. The theme of his research is to develop statistical methods and theory to quantify the uncertainty (confidence interval and hypothesis test) in modern data sets, which are characterized by high dimensionality, complexity, and heterogeneity. He enjoys working at the interface of mathematical statistics, machine learning, and stochastic optimization. He is also interested in applied projects in genomics, neuroscience, epidemiology, and clinical trials. 

Michael Nussbaum is a professor of mathematics. His research program focuses on asymptotic methods in quantum statistics, in particular on hypothesis testing and discrimination between states of quantum systems. Further topics are the equivalence theory of statistical experiments, asymptotic inference in locally stationary time series and adaptive nonparametric hypothesis testing.
 

Kevin Packard is a Lecturer of Statistics and Data Science in Cornell's ILR School.

Sidney Resnick joined the Cornell faculty in 1987 after nine years at Colorado State University, six years at Stanford University, and two years at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Mathematics Center; the Australian National University and CSIRO, in Canberra, Australia; the Technion in Israel (as a Lady Davis Fellow); Sussex University, in Brighton, UK, Erasmus University Rotterdam, ETH Zurich, Department of Statistics, UNC, Chapel Hill; Columbia University; Samsi, Research Triangle Park, NC; Technical University Munich (as John Von Neuman Visiting Professor). Resnick is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and while at Colorado State was an Oliver Pennock Distinguished Service Award winner. He is a founding associate editor of Annals of Applied Probability, and a current associate editor of Stochastic Models, Extremes, Stochastic Processes and their Applications and The Mathematical Scientist. He is a former associate editor of Journal of Applied Probability. He served a three-year term on the Council of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and served on their ad hoc committee on electronic publishing. He is currently an editor for Birkhauser, Boston serving on the boards of the Progress in Probability and Progress in Probability and Its Applications series and also serves on the editorial board of the Springer series Operations Research and Financial Engineering. His BS is from Queens College, NYC and his PhD is from Purdue. Resnick concluded a five year term as Director of Cornell's School of Operations Research and Information Engineering in June 2004. Professor Resnick has authored or coauthored 160 papers and four books.
 

David Ruppert is the Andrew Schultz Jr. Professor of Engineering in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and professor of statistics and data science at Cornell University. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Cornell in 1970, an M.A. in mathematics from the University of Vermont in 1973, and a Ph.D. in statistics and probability from Michigan State University in 1977. He was assistant and then associate professor of statistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, from 1977 to 1987. He is a Fellow of the ASA and IMS, and received the Wilcoxon Prize in 1986. Ruppert was named a "highly cited" researcher by ISIHighlyCited.com and was ranked 21st in mathematics by journal citations. 

Gennady Samorodnitsky received his B.S. in 1978 from the Moscow Steel and Alloys Institute, USSR, his M.S. and his D. Sc. 1986 from Technion, Israel in 1983. He joined the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering in 1988. After completing his doctorate, Samorodnitsky spent two years as a visiting professor, first at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then at Boston University.
 

I joined the Cornell faculty in 1978 as a member of the Biometrics Unit in the Department of Plant Breeding and Biometry; this became the Department of Biometrics, and subsequently the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology. I am also a faculty member in the Department of Statistical Science. I was the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Biometry and Statistics program from 1991 to 2009. I retired from active faculty status in December 2011.

Soroosh Shafiee (Shafieezadeh Abadeh) joined the faculty at Cornell in July 2023 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering. Before that, he held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran and a Ph.D. degree in Management of Technology from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Melissa Smith is a teaching professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. She joined the faculty in January 2013. She received an A.B. in mathematics from Dartmouth College and completed a Ph.D. in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996. Her previous positions were at the Indiana University School of Medicine in the Department of Biostatistics, the Marion County Health Department (Indianapolis), and the Cornell Statistical Consulting Unit (CSCU). She works in applied statistics on problems in medicine, public health, and health policy.

Karthik Sridharan is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Pennsylvania, jointly with Alexander Rakhlin and Michael Kearns. He obtained his Ph.D. from Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago where his thesis advisor was Nathan Srebro. His primary area of research is theoretical machine learning, with interests in statistical learning theory, online learning, optimization, empirical process theory, concentration inequalities, and game theory.

Felix Thoemmes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology, and is a member of the graduate field of Statistics. Before he came to Cornell, he was a Professor at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, in the Center for Educational Science and Psychology, and an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University.

Bruce Turnbull received the B.S. from Cambridge University in 1967 and the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1971. After serving on the faculty at Stanford University and at the University of Oxford, he joined Cornell University in 1976, where he is currently Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering where he previously served as Acting Director.

Paul Velleman is a Professor Emeritus with Social Statistics in the Industrial and Labor Relations School. His research is focused on Distance and Online Learning, Healthcare, abd Statistical Theory, Methods and Analysis. He also does work with Data Analysis, Computer Applications, and Computer Graphics.
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Fei Wang is an associate professor at Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University. His major researchinterest is data mining, machine learning and their applications in health data science. He has published on the top venues of related areas such as ICML, KDD, NeurIPS, AAAI, JAMA Internal Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, etc. His team won the championship of the NIPS/Kaggle Challenge on Classification of Clinically Actionable Genetic Mutations in 2017 and Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative data challenge organized by Michael J. Fox Foundation in 2016. Dr. Wang is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2018, the inaugural research leadership award in IEEE International Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI) 2019, Amazon Machine Learning for Research Award in 2017 and 2019, Google Faculty Research Award in 2020, Sanofi iDEA Award in 2021. Dr. Wang was the chair of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Miningworking group in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in 2018-2019. Dr. Wang’s research has been supported by funding agencies including NSF, NIH, ONR, PCORI and MJFF. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), a Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences and Informatics (IAHSI), and a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
 

Y. Samuel (Sam) Wang is an assistant professor of statistics and data science. Prior to joining Cornell in 2021, he was a post-doc at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and he completed his Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Washington. He also previously worked as a management consultant before his Ph.D. studies. His primary research areas are graphical models and causal discovery.

Marten Wegkamp is a professor of statistics and data science. His research areas are mathematical statistics, empirical process theory, high-dimensional statistics, and statistical learning theory. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Leiden University in 1996 and joined the Cornell faculty in 2011.

Kilian Weinberger is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in machine learning under the supervision of Lawrence Saul, and his undergraduate degree in mathematics and computing from the University of Oxford. In 2011 he was awarded the Outstanding AAAI Senior Program Chair Award and in 2012 he received an NSF CAREER award. He is the recipient of the Daniel M. Lazar '29 Excellence in Teaching Award (2016) and the Ann S. Bowers Teaching and Advising Excellence Award (2024). As of 2024, he is an ACM and AAAI fellow and in 2021 became a Blavatnik National Awards Finalist. Since 2024 he has been a member of the Sloan Research Fellowships Selection Committee. Weinberger's research focuses on machine learning and its applications. In particular, he has worked on learning under resource constraints, metric learning, AI in science, computer vision, autonomous vehicles, Gaussian processes, and deep learning. Before joining Cornell University, he was an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and before that, he worked as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara. 

Martin T. Wells, Ph.D., joined the Cornell faculty in 1987 and is the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Sciences. He is also a professor of social statistics, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Weill Medical School, and an elected member of the Cornell Law School faculty.

Dana Yang is an assistant professor of statistics and data sciences. Prior to joining Cornell in 2022, she completed a Simons-Berkeley fellowship, where she participated in the Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference program at UC Berkeley. Prior to that, she had a stint as a postdoctoral associate at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Yang obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Tsinghua University and earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in statistics from Yale University.