Dr. Ana-Maria Staicu Receives Prestigious NSF Career Award
Grant Will Support Research in Next Generation Functional Methods
Dr. Ana-Maria Staicu, assistant professor in the NC State Department of Statistics, has received a 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her research in functional methods.
NSF awards the prestigious CAREER grants to outstanding junior faculty members to help them advance their research and teaching activities. Staicu’s project, “Next Generation of Functional Methods for the Analysis of Emerging Repeated Measurements,” will continue through March 2020. The project will develop next generation statistical methods for the analysis of emerging data structures that are correlated because of a longitudinal-based design.
“The work meets the growing demand for pragmatic and data efficient statistical methods for such complex correlated functional data,” Staicu said. “Accounting for the dependence within the subject as well as for the longitudinal design is crucial for modeling and inference. However, current methods either ignore the dependence or are too complicated and computationally intensive.”
The research in Staicu’s project has three specific objectives. The first is to introduce novel parsimonious modeling framework for repeatedly observed functional variables, which will enable researchers to extract low dimensional features and use them to study the process dynamics. The second is to develop significance tests to formally assess the effect of covariates. The third is to develop association models and inferential procedures for when functional variables are predictors and for when a scalar variable is the response observed in a longitudinal design.
The educational objectives of the project are to increase the exposure of middle-school and high-school students to exciting statistical methods through hands-on, project-related activities and to increase the exposure of undergraduate students to cutting-edge research in statistics. Staicu is also passionate about having an international impact.
“My outreach initiative to teach functional data techniques to developing countries will be beneficial for the advancement of all societies as we share and disseminate knowledge,” she said.
Staicu’s project will create new techniques that will be relevant to many other current applications, such as in medicine, economics, environmetrics and agriculture. Scientists will be able to analyze such data structures using methods that are theoretically sound, interpretable and easily accessible. The proposed methods will make major contributions to the area of functional data analysis and will impact other fields of statistics, such as brain imaging and dynamic treatment regimes.
“It’s an honor to have my research recognized by the NSF CAREER Award,” Staicu said. “I am grateful for the support of the students in my research group, my mentors and my colleagues at NC State.”
Staicu received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto at Toronto in 2007 and joined the faculty at NC State in 2009. Prior to coming to NC State, Staicu was a Brunel Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom