Amherst College Statistics and Data Science Newsletter (December, 2025)

Greetings from the New Statistics Department at Amherst College

We send our greetings from Amherst where we are finishing up the first fall semester for the new Department of Statistics. We’re really excited by the new beginnings. Here’s a LINK to an article in Amstat News (the membership magazine of the American Statistical Association).

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 Professor Horton. In any case don’t hesitate to be in touch.

Professor Amy Wagaman, Inaugural Chair of Statistics

Awards

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

Dhyey Mavani ’25, and Emma Strawbridge ’25 shared the Breusch prize for best honors thesis in statistics in 2025.
Elizabeth Zhang ’24 won the Breusch prize for best honors thesis in statistics in 2024.
Casey Crary ’26 and Kevin Dai ’25 received the Walker Teaching Award
Oren Tirschwell ’25 and Sheryl Solarzano ’27 received the Walker Leadership Award.
Angelica Sang ’24, Mahathi Athreya ’24, and Dasha Asienga ’24 received the Walker Award in Statistics for 2024.
Emma Strawbridge ’25 received the Walker Award in Statistics for 2025.
Bridget Cassata ’24, Selena Hong ’24, Lucas Bernstein ’25, Wendy Espinosa ’25, and Oren Tirschwell ’25 were recent recipients of Amherst College Five College Statistics award.
We’re Amherst Proud of Casey Crary ’26 for his award winning CAUSE USRESP project “Exploring Capture Recapture Methods: From Historical Origins to Modern Applications” and Jack McDermott ’25 for his honorable mention for “A Tutorial in Generating Synthetic Data to Mitigate Disclosure Risk in Microdata: An Expository Review of Taylor, Zhou, and Rise (2017)”.
Congratulations to our Mu Sigma Rho (national statistics honor society) inductees: Daizy Buluma, Wendy Espinosa, Camden Heafitz, Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Tyler McCord, Cody Pierce, Donna L Zhang, Dhyey Mavani, Cassandra Jin, Daniel Jang, Oren Tirschwell, Emma Strawbridge, Emily Byers, John Fitzhenry, Casey Crary, Shreya Mathew, Benjamin Nigrovic, Jack McDermott, Sierra Rosado, Adam Rogers, Kedar Nagaraj, and Arjun Kejriwal.

Statistics Theses

Congratulations to recent thesis writers and their advisors for their work:

Shreya Mathew worked with Prof. Amy Wagaman on “Predicting Stock Returns Using Bayesian Networks in Style-Based US Equity Investing”

- Dhyey Mavani worked with Prof. Shu-Min Liao on “ccrvam : a Python Package for Model-Free Exploratory Analysis of Multivariate Discrete Data with an Ordinal Response Variable”

Emma Strawbridge worked with Prof. Amy Wagaman on “Capturing Baseball Pitch Patterns with Hidden Markov Models”
Elizabeth Zhang worked with Prof. Amy Wagaman on “Flexible Bayesian regression models for complex interactions in exposure mixture studies”
Justin Papagelis worked with Prof. Shu-Min Liao on “On the Analysis of Likert-Scale Data: Historical Debates and Newly Developed Approaches”
Dasha Asienga worked with Prof. Kat Correia on “Algorithmic Bias, Statistical Notions of Fairness, and the Seldonian Framework”

Statistics and Data Science Colloquia

The Amherst College Statistics and Data Science Colloquium hosted a variety of talks in recent years, including visits from Francesca Dominici (Harvard University), Becky Tang (Middlebury College), Kate Moore (Amherst College), Krista Gile (UMass/Amherst), Rebecca Kurtz-Garcia (Smith College), Isabelle Beaudry (Mount Holyoke College), Ofer Harel (University of Connecticut), Minsu Kim (UMass/Amherst), Matteo Riondato (Amherst College), Ben Baumer (Smith College), Troy Wixson (UMass/Amherst), and Kate Shutta (Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health). 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. More information can be found here.

Frost Byte Cluster

Thanks to the efforts of Amy Wagaman and Lee Spector, the College received a grant from the National Science Foundation to acquire a high performance computing (HPC) cluster. Many students and faculty have been using the cluster for the coursework and research. See here for an announcement and more details about the Frost Byte cluster.

DataFest

The ASA Five College DataFest competition has been back on track at UMass/Amherst. Two Amherst College teams won prizes for their analytic prowess.

Congrats to the Random Forest Rangers (Casey Crary, Kevin Dai, Reihaneh Iranmanesh, and Sarah Wu) who wan award at DataFest 2025 for “Best Infographic”.

Also kudos to the PyRates (Liam Davis, Thu Hoang, Ryan Ji, Yichen Liu, and Dhyey Mavani) for their award for “Best Use of External Data” in 2025.

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 was able to offered again.

Faculty Updates

Nick Horton

Nick Horton was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Nick also received the Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award from the American Statistical Association.

Pam Matheson

Professor Matheson co-authored a paper in the Journal of the American Dental Association entitled “Nonopioid vs opioid analgesics after impacted third-molar extractions: The Opioid Analgesic Reduction Study randomized clinical trial”. The article showed that a combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen managed pain better than the opioid hydrocodone with acetaminophen for patients during the first two days after having an impacted wisdom tooth pulled. Dentists are responsible for one-third of opioid prescriptions to adolescents, a vulnerable population for opioid misuse, so these findings are important in addressing the ongoing opioid crisis.

Amy Wagaman

Professor Wagaman published a paper on NumSimEX with Professor Sheila Jaswal (Chemistry) in January, with several undergraduate student co-authors. She also published a paper on communication skills in teaching theoretical statistics in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education. She worked with summer students on a thesis project for next year and updating teaching materials.

Alumni and Student News

Tyler McCord ’26 attended a Boston Red Sox game organized as part of a course on sports analytics at Smith College taught by Professor and Former Mets Data Scientist Ben Baumer.

Emma Strawbridge ’25 has begun a PhD program in Statistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Dhyey Mavani ’25 is working LinkedIn as an AI/ML Software Engineer in Sunnyvale, CA. In his spare time he is continuing work stemming from his Stats thesis, Math thesis, and RBlocks research experience.

Ephrata Getachew ’25 is a graduate student in statistics at Wake Forest University.

Anna Zhou ’25 is working at EY-Parthenon as a strategy consultant.

Abbey Skinner ’24 is in her second year of the Biostatistics PhD Program at the University of North Carolina.

Ainsley Mackenzie ’22 graduated with an MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics and am now working at Yale University.

Steph Masotti ’22 writes: I a PhD candidate in the program in Computational Biology in the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. I received the John Woodruff Simpson fellowship for the study of medicine in graduate school from the Amherst College Office of fellowships for two consecutive years, providing additional financial support for my studies. I am primarily advised by Dr. Nate Lord in Computational & Systems Biology @ Pitt and co-advised by Dr. Oana Carja in Computational Biology @ CMU. I am working at the intersection of developmental biology and evolutionary theory, cutely named “evo-devo”. My day-to-day work involves culturing human stem cells (fyi - I never stepped foot in a wet lab while at Amherst!), programming Matlab scripts to run our upright epifluorescence microscope, reading literature, and developing models to simulate my experimental system. I am currently developing this system to observe and manipulate the spatiotemporal dynamics involved in cell competition. I would love to chat to any students who are interested in the transition from college to graduate school, computational biology, switching disciplines, working in a wet lab for the first time in graduate school, getting a PhD in a med school, or anything else!

Clara Chae Young Seo ’21 was awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship in 2025 to pursue a PhD at Caltech.

Maria-Cristiana (Kitty) Gîrjău ’21 received the Center for Teaching and Learning Lead Teaching Fellow Award at Columbia University.

Joseph Feldman ’18 shared: “I graduated with my Ph.D. from Rice Statistics, earning the James R. Thompson award for outstanding doctoral research (given to two students annually). My doctoral research was primarily in Bayesian joint models for mixed data types, and also subset selection in quantile regression. I won three ASA student paper awards during my Ph.D. (Health policy in ’22, and Bayesian statistical science and Survey Research Methods in ’23), and had a paper published in the Annals of Applied Statistics.

I am a postdoc working with Jerry Reiter at Duke on issues of data privacy, formalizing the privacy implications of synthetic data releases. I am interested in how synthetic data may pervade society in the age of AI.”

Christien Wright ’18 wrote: “In May, I began my first season with the Washington Mystics as their Coaching Analyst. In this role, I oversee all player and team performance analytics, supporting our strategic decision-making and player development initiatives throughout the season. Being based in the same facility as the Washington Wizards and their G League affiliate, the Capital City Go-Go, has also created unique opportunities for cross-team collaboration and shared analytics insights across the organization. If anyone wants to chat about sports, feel free to reach out!”

Olivia Xu ’17 writes: “In the past year, I’ve moved to New York City, gotten married to another Amherst alum (Thornton Ellis class of ’16 and CS major), and started a new role working in Strategy and M&A at a large tech company. I never knew roles like this existed while at Amherst, and they are always keen to hire people with a quantitative background.”

Rishi Kowalski ’16 writes: “I’ve been living in Chicago since graduating a master’s program in Biostatistics in 2018. After a stint at the United States Soccer Federation, I’ve been working in public health surveillance of opioids and infectious diseases at the local level. If you’re interested in wastewater, sports, or public health, I’m happy to chat!”

Last updated December 12, 2025