Yanyuan Ma is a Chinese-American mathematical statistician whose research interests include semiparametric models, dimension reduction, selection bias, and skew-symmetric distributions. She is a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University. [1]
Ma has a 1994 bachelor's degree in mathematics from Peking University. [1] [2] She began her doctoral studies at Stanford University, but switched after a year to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [2] where she completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1999. [1] Her dissertation, Studies in Matrix Perturbation and Robust Statistics, was jointly supervised by mathematician and computer scientist Alan Edelman and by statistician Marc G. Genton. [3]
After working in industry, and then as a postdoctoral researcher beginning in 2002, she took an assistant professorship at Texas A&M University in 2004. From 2006 to 2008 she was a professor at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, but she returned to Texas A&M as an associate professor in 2008, [2] bringing her doctoral student Tanya P. Garcia with her. [4] At Texas A&M, she was promoted to full professor in 2011. She became a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina, [3] [5] from 2014 until 2016, when she moved again to her present position at Pennsylvania State University. [2]
Ma was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2017, "for influential and original contributions to the development of dimension reduction techniques, and to semiparametric theory and methodology". [6] She was also elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2017. [7]
Yanyuan Ma is a Chinese-American mathematical statistician whose research interests include semiparametric models, dimension reduction, selection bias, and skew-symmetric distributions. She is a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University. [1]
Ma has a 1994 bachelor's degree in mathematics from Peking University. [1] [2] She began her doctoral studies at Stanford University, but switched after a year to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [2] where she completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1999. [1] Her dissertation, Studies in Matrix Perturbation and Robust Statistics, was jointly supervised by mathematician and computer scientist Alan Edelman and by statistician Marc G. Genton. [3]
After working in industry, and then as a postdoctoral researcher beginning in 2002, she took an assistant professorship at Texas A&M University in 2004. From 2006 to 2008 she was a professor at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, but she returned to Texas A&M as an associate professor in 2008, [2] bringing her doctoral student Tanya P. Garcia with her. [4] At Texas A&M, she was promoted to full professor in 2011. She became a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina, [3] [5] from 2014 until 2016, when she moved again to her present position at Pennsylvania State University. [2]
Ma was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2017, "for influential and original contributions to the development of dimension reduction techniques, and to semiparametric theory and methodology". [6] She was also elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2017. [7]