By David Murphy, KAUST News
KAUST Assistant Professor Raphaël Huser recently received the American Statistical Association's (ASA) 2019 Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) Early Investigator Award for his outstanding contributions to environmental statistics. He accepted the award at the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings held in Denver, Colorado, U.S., from July 27 to August 1.
Huser is based in the KAUST Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division, and his research focuses on the development of new models and methods for extreme events observed in space and time, with various applications in the environmental sciences.
The ASA award citation noted the impact of his research and granted the award "for the development of highly flexible models for extreme events observed in space and time and the detailed study of their joint tail behavior; for the development of novel computationally efficient methods for multivariate extreme value distributions; and for an exceptionally wide range of environmental and risk assessment applications."
"I am...extremely grateful [to receive the award]," Huser stated. "I'm especially grateful to my students and postdocs for their constant hard work; and to my collaborators; as well as to my statistics colleagues at KAUST and those from ENVR of the ASA; and to my nominators, without whose support this would not have been possible."
Developing novel statistical models to better understand extreme weather events
Huser received his Ph.D. degree in statistics from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2013. He also received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and his master's degree in applied mathematics from EPFL. After joining KAUST in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow, Huser then transitioned to his current role as an assistant professor at the University in 2015. He is currently the principal investigator of the KAUST extSTAT research group.
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