Vannucci elected IMS fellow

Marina Vannucci, professor of statistics, has been named a fellow in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), a prestigious international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination and application of statistics and probability.

Vannucci will be presented with the honor at the IMS Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. this August, as some 5,000 statisticians, government officials and educators from across the globe hold meetings.

The professor is being recognized by the institute for “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of Bayesian methods for variable selection, and of wavelet-based modeling and for her mentorship of young researchers,” IMS leaders said.

“This is a great honor for Marina and richly deserved,” said Sallie Keller-McNulty, William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering, who is also a professor of statistics. “It recognizes her many accomplishments and her devotion to developing future researchers in a highly important field.”

Vannucci is also a fellow in the American Statistical Association and a member of the International Statistical Institute. She won the Mitchell prize from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2003. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, including a prestigious CAREER Award in 2001.

The professor came to Rice two years ago from the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University where she was a full professor and co-directed the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Facility Core in the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center for Environmental and Rural Health. Earlier, Vannucci was a visiting scholar at both Stanford and Columbia Universities. She completed a research fellowship at the University of Kent at Canterbury in Britain, and holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and doctorate in statistics from the University of Florence in Italy.

Vannucci is also an adjunct professor in the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and co-directs the joint-Rice and M.D. Anderson Interinstitutional Graduate Program in Biostatistics. The program’s mission is to develop technical, practical and leadership expertise among students in biostatistics, with the hope of enabling them to contribute to improved human health throughout the world.

Dwight Daniels, Engineering Communications