I am a research fellow at the Centre for Environmental Informatics (CEI) within the University of Wollongong. My research at CEI with Noel Cressie and Andrew Zammit-Mangion involves developing new statistical methods for understanding and predicting Antarctic biodiversity, as well as statistical downscaling of regional climate variables with uncertainty quantification for biodiversity studies. The research is part of Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Initiative that aims to understand, manage, and forecast the environmental changes taking place across the Antarctic region.
My research interests lie in developing parametric and nonparametric methods for learning from complex and dependent data. Some research areas I currently focus on include spatial statistics, probabilistic downscaling (from coarse to fine resolutions), point process modeling, data integration, transfer learning, and statistical deep learning. Methods development in these areas is strongly motivated by addressing real-word scientific challenges, particularly in ecological and environmental applications, among others.
I received my Ph.D. in Statistical Science in 2022 from the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I worked on mixture modeling for non-Gaussian spatial and temporal processes, advised by Athanasios Kottas and Bruno Sansó.
Upcoming activities and recent news
Aug 2025: Topic-contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Nashville, USA.
Mar 2025: I accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia, starting August 2025.
Jan 2025: Our paper “Spatial-statistical downscaling with uncertainty quantification in biodiversity modelling” has been accepted by Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Jan 2025: Our paper “A new family of error distributions for Bayesian quantile regression” has been accepted by Bayesian Analysis.
Dec 2024: Invited talks at TIES 2024 at the University of South Australia (Mawson Lakes Campus), Australia.
Oct 2024: Seminar at the Department of Statistics, UNSW Sydney, Australia.
Aug 2024: Our paper “Bayesian geostatistical modeling for discrete-valued processes” received the 2023 Wiley-TIES Best Environmetrics Paper Award (selected from all papers published in Environmetrics in 2023).
Aug 2024: Contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Portland, USA.
July 2024: Invited talk at the 3rd Bayesian Nonparametrics Networking Workshop at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.
May 2024: Seminar (online) at the Department of Statistics, Oregon State University, USA.
Dec 2023: Invited talk (online) at CFE-CMStatistics (hybrid conference) in Berlin, Germany.
Dec 2023: Contributed talk at the Australian Statistical Conference at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Dec 2023: Contributed talk at the 2nd Bayesian Nonparametrics Networking Workshop at Monash University, Australia.
Nov 2023: Seminar at the School of Economics, University of Sydney, Australia.
Oct 2023: Seminar for the Global Climate Change Week at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Aug 2023: Topic-contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto, Canada.
July 2023: Contributed talk (online) at the TIES Regional Meeting (hybrid conference) in Peterborough, Canada.
July 2023: Contributed talks at the 6th Spatial Statistics conference at the University of Colorado, USA.
May 2023: Our team within CEI in NIASRA won first place in one of the categories of the 2023 KAUST Competition on Spatial Statistics for Large Datasets.
May 2023: Invited talk at the 13th Workshop on Bayesian Inference for Stochastic Processes (BISP13) in Madrid, Spain.
Jan 2023: Student Paper Award from the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the ASA.