Research Interests

Probability modeling and statistical inference for geometrical and functional data and associated statistical inverse problems in the natural sciences, with particular emphasis on problems arising in biophysics. In particular:
-geometrical statistics and stochastic geometry (point processes, shape theory)
-statistical inverse problems (random tomography, infinite-dimensional testing)
-statistical inference for random processes (partially observed processes, Gaussian processes)
-abstract statistical inference (functional data analysis, quantum statistics)
-mathematical biology (statistics in structural biology, DNA topology, stochastic epidemics)

Honours and Awards

2019 Bernoulli Society Forum Lecturer (two plenary lectures to be delivered at EMS 2019, Palermo)

Named one of the "40 extraordinary scientists under 40" invited to participate at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China (2014).

Awarded an ERC Starting Grant Award (2010)

Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (2008).

Erich Lehmann Prize for an Outstanding Thesis in Theoretical Statistics, UC Berkeley (2007).

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley (2005)

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2005).

Editorial Service

Associate Editor, Annals of Statistics, June 2018-Present.

Associate Editor, Biometrika, May 2011-Present.

Associate Editor, JASA Theory & Methods, January 2017-Present.

Editor, Bernoulli News, May 2011-May 2015 (two terms).

Associate Editor, Annals of Applied Statistics, December 2011-December 2018.

Associate Editor, The Electronic Journal of Statistics, January 2010-December 2018.

Served as Referee for: Advances in Applied Probability, Annals of Applied Statistics, Annals of Statistics, Bernoulli, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory & Methods / Applications and Case Studies), Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Oxford University Press, John Wiley & Sons.

Invited Conference Talks

Invited Talk, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Annual Meeting, Vilnius, Lithuania (2018)

Invited Talk, Statistics of geometric features and new data types, Newton Institute, Cambridge (2018).

Invited Talk, German Open Stochastics Meeting, Freiburg im Breisgau (2018).

Invited Tak, Statistics for Data with Geometric Structure, Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (2018).

Invited Talk, Statistics Meets Friends: From Biophysics to Inverse Problems and Back, Göttingen (2017).

Invited Talks, Stochastics Meeting, Lunteren, The Netherlands (2017)

Invited Talk, International Statistical Institute (ISI) World Congress, Marrakech (2017).

Invited Talk, Fourth International Workshop on Functional and Operatorial Statistics (IWFOS), La Coruna (2017).

Invited Lectures, 47th Annual John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures: Mathematical Foundations of Data Science, Knoxville, (2016)

Invited Talk, Statistical Recovery of Discrete, Geometric and Invariant Structures, Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (2017)

Invited Talk, Functional Data Analysis Session, International Conference on Statistics and Computing, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Seville (2016).

Invited Talk, Functional Data Analysis Session, International Meeting on Nonparametric Statistics, Avignon, France (2016)

Invited Lecture, Conference on Random Sets in Action, University of Bern, Switzerland (2016)

Invited Talk, Workshop on Statistical Analysis of Manifold-Valued Data and Beyond, University of Nottingham, UK (2016)

Invited Short Course, Swiss Doctoral School in Statistics and Applied Probability (2016)

Invited Talk, IMS Annual Meeting, Joint Statistics Meetings, Seattle (2015).

Invited Talk, European Meeting of Statisticians, Amsterdam (2015).

Invited Talk, IMS-Microsoft Workshop on "Foundations of Data Science", Boston (2015).

Invited Talk, TMU/LMU Workshop on Functional Data Analysis, Munich (2015).

Invited Talk, Geometry and Nonparametrics Session, International Meeting on Nonparametric Statistics, Cadiz, Span (2014).

Invited Talk, Statistics of Deformations Session, International Meeting on Nonparametric Statistics, Cadiz, Span (2014).

Invited Short Course, "Functional and Complex Structure Data Analysis", European Course in Advanced Statistics, Castro Urdiales, Spain (2013).

Invited Discussant "Recent Developments in Nonparametric Statistics on Manifolds" Session, at the 59th World Statistics Congress, International Statistical Institute, Hong Kong, China (2013).

Invited Talk, Dependent Functional Data Session, 29th European Meeting of Statisticians, Budapest, Hungrary (2013).

Invited Talk, Swiss Probability Meeting, University of Bern (2013).

Invited Talk, Workshop on Statistical Inverse Problems, University College London (2013).

Invited Talk, Dependent Functional Data Research Workshop, Universität Göttingen (2013).

Invited Talk, Statistics in Functional and Hilbert Spaces Session, International Conference on Statistics and Computing, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Oviedo (2012).

Invited Talk, Workshop on Statistics of Time Warping and Phase Variations, Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio (2012).

Invited Talk, High Dimensional and Dependent Functional Data Research Workshop, University of Bristol (2012).

Invited Talk, Functional Data Analysis Session, IMS/Bernoulli World Congress in Mathematical Statistics and Probability, Istanbul (2012).

Invited Talk, Nonparametric Methods for Time Dynamic Object Modeling Session, International Meeting on Nonparametric Statistics, Chalkidiki, Greece (2012).

Intited Talk, Progress on Statistical Issues in Searches, SLAC National Accelarator Laboratory, Stanford, CA (2012).

Invited Talk, Meeting on Uncertainty Quantification, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Raleigh (2012).

Invited Talk, Statistics in Functional and Hilbert Spaces Session, 4th International Conference on Statistics and Computing, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, London (2011).

Invited Lecture, Annual Meeting of the Swiss Mathematical Society Society, Zürich (2011).
Two Invited Lectures, 56th Annual Meeting of the International Biometric Society (Brazilian Region), Maringa, Brazil (2011).

Invited Speaker, ICORS (International Conference on Robust Statistics), Valladolid, Spain (2011).

Invited Speaker, 'PHYSTAT - Statistical Issues for Large Hadron Collider Physics', CERN, Geneva, Switzerland (2011).

Invited Lecture, Opening Workshop for the SAMSI Programme on "Analysis of Object Data" (2010).

One of the Invited Plenary Lectures at the Dutch Meeting of Mathematical Statisticians and Probabilists (2009)

One of three Invited "David G. Kendall Memorial Lectures", 58th Session of the International Statistical Institute (2009).

Invited Discussant "Model Building and Regularisation" Session at the 58th Session of the International Statistical Institute (2009).

Invited Talk, "New Frontiers in Stochastic Geometry" Workshop - Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (2008).

Invited Talk "Methods and Imaging for Porous Media Conference", Paris (2008).

Invited Discussant "Stochastic Modeling for Earthquakes and Tsunamis Session" 57th Session of the International Statistical Institute (2007).

One of the Invited Plenary Lecturers at the Swiss Statistics Meeting (2007).

Invited Seminars

Stochastics Oberseminar, Mathematical Institute, University of Bonn (2018)

Department of Mathematics, University of Rome Tor Vergata (2018).

Programme on Statistical Scalability, Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge (2018).

Statistics Seminar, Department of Statistics, University of Warwick (2018).

Statistics Seminar, Statistical Laboratory, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge (2018).

Statistics Seminar, London School of Economics and Political Science (2017).

Computational Statistics Seminar, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (2016)

Department of Mathematics, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (2016)

Department of Mathematics and Computational Science, IBM Zürich (2015).

Centre for Statistics, University of Geneva (2015).

Department of Statistics, University of California at Davis (2014).

Department of Statistics, Stanford University (2014).

Neyman Seminar, Department of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley (2014).

Institute of Mathematical Stochastics and Institute of X-Ray Physics, Universität Göttingen (2014)

Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, Université(s) de Grenoble (2014)

Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Seattle (2013).

Department of Mathematics, Université Libre de Bruxelles (2013).

Department of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley (2013).

Department of Statistics, University of California at Davis (2013).

Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano (2012).

Department of Statistics, Rutgers University (2012).

Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge (2012).

Department of Statistics, University of Washington, Seattle (2012).

Department of Statistical Science, University College London (2011).

Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Heidelberg (2011).

Department of Statistics, University of California at Davis (2011).

Faculty of Science, New York Univeristy Abu Dhabi (2011).

University of Zürich and ETH Zürich Joint Statistics Seminar (2010).

School of Mathematical Sciences, University College Cork (2010).

Department of Statistics & Operations Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2010).

Department of Statistics, Trinity College, University of Dublin (2010).

Centre for Statistics and its Applications, University of Lisbon (2010).

Institute of Mathematical Stochastics, Universität Göttingen (2009).

Institute of X-Ray Physics, Universität Göttingen (2009).

Department of Biostatistics, University of Copenhagen (2009).

Departments of Statistics and Biostatistics, Stanford University (2009).

Department of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley (2009).

Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology, University of Warwick (2009).

Institute of Statistics, Université de Neuchâtel (2008).

Seminar for Statistics, ETH Zürich (2008).

Departent of Statistics, Stanford University (2008).

Department of Statistics and Operations Reseeach, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (2007).

Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2007).

Department of Actuarial Science and Mathematical Statistics, Universität Bern (2007).

Department of Statistics, Stanford University (2007).

Department of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley (2007).

Glaeser Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2007).

Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge (2007).
Department of Statistics, University of Chicago (2007).

Department of Statistics, University of Washington at Seattle (2007).

Departents of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University (2007).

Department of Statistics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2007).

Institute of Mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne - EPFL (2007).

Department of Statistics, University of Oxford (2006).

Department of Mathematics, University of California at San Diego (2006).

Department of Statistics, University of Warwick (2006).

Glaeser Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2005).

Glaeser Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2004).