Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Genevera Allen at Rice has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) for her "notable contributions to statistical learning, leadership in data science education, and service to the profession."
Allen also serves as associate professor of statistics and of computer science. She is an investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.
She is the founding faculty director of the Rice Center for Transforming Data to Knowledge, known as the D2K Lab, which focuses on data-science education, emphasizing innovative and interdisciplinary approaches. The lab offers “experiential learning opportunities to students in the form of courses and co-curricular programs that use complex, real-world data sets to transform data into knowledge and action.”
Allen’s research focuses on developing new statistical machine-learning tools that make it easier for researchers to reproduce data-driven insights. Her areas of study include interpretable machine learning, data integration, modern multivariate analysis and graphical models with applications in neuroscience and bioinformatics.
Allen earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2010 and her B.A. from Rice in 2006, both in statistics, and joined the Rice faculty in 2010.
In 2021 she was the recipient of the Charles W. Duncan Achievement Award for Outstanding Faculty from Rice. She was presented with the George R. Brown School of Engineering’s Curriculum Innovation Award and the Research and Teaching Excellence Award in 2020 and 2017, respectively. In 2014 she was named to the Forbes “30 under 30” Science and Healthcare list.
ASA has more than 19,000 members in more than 70 chapters, publishes 17 journals and holds six annual conferences.