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Sabrina Vettori, a Ph.D. student in KAUST Professor Marc Genton’s Spatio-Temporal Statistics & Data Science group, won the 2017 Student Paper Competition sponsored by the Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

Eligible papers focused on environmental statistics, and the four competition winners presented their papers at an ENVR-sponsored session at the 2017 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), held from July 29 to August 3 in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. JSM is the largest North American gathering of statisticians, and includes participants from ASA, the Statistical Society of Canada, the International Chinese Statistical Association, the International Indian Statistical Association, the Royal Statistical Society, the Korean International Statistical Society and the International Statistical Institute.

Vettori’s winning paper entitled “Bayesian clustering and dimension reduction in multivariate air pollution extremes” was co-authored by Genton and Raphaël Huser, KAUST assistant professor of applied mathematics and computational science.

“I was the first student in the statistics program at KAUST, and it has been amazing to see the statistics group growing over the past three years,” Vettori noted. “I joined KAUST after completing my master’s degree in Italy because of the relevance of the research done here and the environmental statistics applications. What matters to me is being part of projects with a strong social impact dedicated to the protection of the environment and to the improvement of human lives.”

- By Caitlin Clark, KAUST News