Amherst College Statistics and Data Science Newsletter (May, 2026)

Greetings from the Statistics Department at Amherst College

We send our greetings from Amherst where we are finishing up the first academic year for the new Department of Statistics.

We’re pleased to bring this issue of the Statistics and Data Science Newsletter. As always, we look forward to sharing your updates. If you have news we would encourage you to share it with us. In any case don’t hesitate to be in touch.

Professor Amy Wagaman, Inaugural Chair of Statistics

Welcome to New Faculty

We’re excited that Kaitlyn Webb will be joining the faculty in statistics in the fall as a visiting assistant professor. Kaitlyn is finishing her PhD in Statistics at Penn State University with a dual-title in Social Data Analytics. Her research focuses on statistics methodology for social sciences and formal data privacy like differential privacy in support of transparent and reproducible research. Kaitlyn’s work is heavily interdisciplinary, collaborating with computer science researchers, economists, and Bureau of Labor Statistics statisticians. She looks forward to mentoring undergraduates in research once at Amherst College. More about Kaitlyn and the field of differential privacy can be found at: https://sites.psu.edu/krdowden/

Faculty Search Approved

We are pleased to share that we have been authorized to hire a new faculty member next year. The Amherst College Department of Statistics invites applications for a full-time tenure-track position at the assistant professor rank in statistics beginning July 1, 2027. Our expectation is that the successful candidate will excel at teaching and mentoring a broad range of students.

We seek colleagues actively engaged in research who can teach a wide range of courses and help foster the statistics and data science community at Amherst. The position requires a Ph.D. in statistics, biostatistics, or related field completed by the start of the appointment. The successful candidate will have broad intellectual interests, a strong commitment to research, and be passionate about teaching statistics and data science to undergraduates at all levels. Potential candidates can reach out to Professor Wagaman. Please share with your networks!

The announcement can be found here

Awards

Our students have again received a number of awards for their academic and co-curricular efforts. Congrats to the following honorees:

Casey Crary ’26 won the Breusch prize for best honors thesis in statistics.
Rania Adouim ’26 and Casey Crary ’26 received the Walker Award in Statistics.
Walter Clemons ’27 won the Walker Award for Teaching.
Helena Henson ’28 received the Walker Leadership Award.
Rania Adouim ’26, Daniel Jang ’26, and Donna Zhang ’26 received the Amherst College Five College Statistics award.
We’re Amherst Proud of Tyler McCord ’26 for his award winning CAUSE USRESP project “Revisiting The Safe Framework In The Statcast Era: A Modernized Approach To Evaluating MLB Infield Defense” and Chelsea Wang ’27 for her honorable mention for “Two Chances are Better than One: Comparing the Performance of Doubly Robust Methods”.
Congratulations to our Mu Sigma Rho (national statistics honor society) inductees: Walter Clemons, John Lim, and Miranda Yang.

Statistics and Data Science Colloquia

The Amherst College Statistics and Data Science Colloquium hosted a variety of talks this year, including visits from our own Caroline Theoharides (Economics), Troy Wixson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), and Kate Shutta (Harvard University) as well as Katharine Correia (Amherst). More information about the colloquium series can be found here.

Data Science Initiative

The Amherst College Data Science Initiative (DSI) is a campus-wide umbrella to learn and exchange ideas about Data Science. Its main purpose is to enrich the intellectual life of the College, through activities such as speaker series involving both members of the College community and external guests, panels, workshops, and tutorials, often organized in participation with other partners on campus.

Recent talks from Amherst faculty included Solsiree del Moral (“Digitizing and Studying Puerto Rico Census Records”, American Studies and Black Studies). Enoch Shin ’21 was a coauthor with Professor del Moral on a related paper in the Latin American Research Review entitled “Children and Institutions: US Censuses, Race, Class, and Gender in Puerto Rico’s Institutions for Minors, 1910–1940”.

Kerry Ratigan (“Global South Public Opinion of China”, Political Science), Mia de Los Reyes (“Small Galaxies, Big Data”, Physics and Astronomy), and a group of recent Amherst alums gave a talk on “Mapping the Liberal Arts: A Semantic Similarity Approach”. More information on DSI can be found here.

ASA Five College DataFest 2026

The ASA Five College DataFest competition took place at the new Public Health building at UMass/Amherst. An Amherst College teams won a prize for their analytic prowess. Congrats to Bebu’s Research Team (Tyler Karp, Erika Salvador, Helena Henson, and Rania Adouim) for “Best Use of Survival Curve (a.k.a., the Kaplan-Meier Award)”.

Statistical Ethics of Institutions (STAT108)

Amherst Alum and Visiting Scholar Andreas V. Georgiou once again taught a general education course on statistical principles and ethics (STAT108) this fall. The course discusses standards for relationships between statisticians and policymakers, researchers, the press, and other institutions, as well as interactions between statisticians and their employers/clients, colleagues and research subjects. Students explored how the interplay of institutions (e.g., organizations, systems, laws, codes of professional ethics) and the broader sociopolitical culture affect the production of reliable, high quality statistics. We are pleased that this innovative course will also be offered in the fall.

Faculty Updates

Kat Correia

Kat Correia reports that she has been thoroughly enjoying her research sabbatical this year, focused on several reproductive-medicine related projects including: graphical lasso methods for visualizing associations between maternal hormones and birth outcomes; discrete survival analysis for predicting the number of eggs needed for a live birth in elective egg-freezing cycles; and inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighted analyses for two-component exposures to identify the impact of antiretroviral therapies on placental and birth outcomes.

She also delighted in a few weeks of travel: one to the Netherlands for a conference on survival analysis, and another to Florida for an adaptive sports camp with daily windsurfing, outrigger canoeing, and soccer.

Outside of work, she is having fun losing to her son (now 13) in chess and reading the Harry Potter books in order with her daughter (now 10).

Nick Horton

Nick Horton chaired a National Academies Consensus Study on “Developing Competencies for the Future of Data and Computing: The Role of K-12” that was released in March. While computing and data shape nearly every aspect of modern life, efforts to expand data and computing education in K-12 settings have grown rapidly but unevenly. The new report (freely downloadable from the website) offers a road map for state and local education agencies to integrate data and computing into school curricula and courses in a consistent manner.

Amy Wagaman

Amy Wagaman is looking forward to working with colleagues on research projects in nonparametric statistics, chemistry, and statistics and data science education, over the summer. Thanks to the academic interns who supported early stages of work on these projects over the last year.

Amy chaired the Joint Statistical Meetings Continuing Education Committee this past year, organizing all the continuing education courses at the upcoming JSM in Boston in August. Additionally, she served on the program committee for the conference as Poster Chair, organizing almost 500 posters into their sessions for the conference. She is looking forward to attending the conference and presenting on one of her projects.

Alumni and Student News

Kaitlyn Haase ’19 got married to Amherst ’20 grad Zack Horwitz, this past New Year’s Eve. She graduated from Harvard Business School this May and will be working full time on the Global Strategy team at New Balance in Boston starting this summer.

Congrats to Phebe Palmer ’21 for her recent publication “Association between anosognosia and neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease dementia patients”.

Jett Knight ’23E is working as Business Planning Analyst with Hasbro. Previously he had been a BI Analyst for the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority).

Beth Williamson ’23E graduated from University of St Andrews in 2024 with a Masters in applied statistics and datamining. She works at AMG in Stamford, CT (an asset management firm) on the sales operations and distribution intelligence team where they assist with managing data for the sales team.

Ephrata Getachew ’25 writes that she is finishing her first year in the M.S. Statistics program at Wake Forest University. She is working on a project with Dr. Robert Erhardt involving Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling of Valley Fever case counts using environmental drought covariates. This summer, she will be interning with Travelers through their Data Science Leadership Development Program, working on the Research and Data Science team.

Casey Crary ’26 will be starting a doctoral program in statistics at Cornell University in the fall.

Daniel Jang ’26 will be moving to Philadelphia in August to start a Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania.