Assistant Professor Ying Sun wins American Statistical Association award

Ying Sun, KAUST assistant professor of applied mathematics and computational science, won the 2017 Section on Statistics and the Environment Early Investigator Award.

​​​​Ying Sun, KAUST assistant professor of applied ​mathematics and computational science​, won the 2017 Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) Early Investigator Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA). Sun received her award at the 2017 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), held from July 29 to August 3 in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.

Sun's award recognizes her important contributions to the field of environmental statistics that help to address major problems like climate change and environmental pollution. At KAUST, Sun leads the Environmental Statistics Group in the University's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division, in which she focuses her research on computational efficiency, innovative visualization techniques and estimation methodologies. Her work has already won many other awards, including for research in modeling large and complex space-time datasets to detect ozone hot spots and predict rainfall patterns and novel data visualization tools with applications from ecology and medicine to biometrics and finance.

“I'm very honored to receive this award in recognition of my contributions to environmental statistics. I'm also thankful to my colleagues who supported me over the years and for everybody in my research group who has brought energy and enthusiasm to our work at KAUST," Sun said.

Mootaz Elnozahy, dean of CEMSE, noted, "The award is testament to the great esteem that the international research community in environmental statistics holds for Sun’s research at KAUST. I hope that in addition to the honor of receiving this prestigious award, Sun’s research will help increase the visibility of our collective effort at KAUST in environmental research.”