Research Students

One of the best parts of being a faculty member is having the opportunity to mentor student research at all levels, on a wide variety of project topics broadly aligned with my research interests. The links below give a sense of the kinds of work students have pursued with me. I have also supervised students through the Voting Rights Data Institute and the Data Science for Social Good program, as well as serving as a mentor and the mentor coordinator for WSU’s Research and Mentoring Program.

If you are a current Vassar student who is interested in working with me, feel free to send me an email or stop by my office to chat. This link contains some specific project descriptions that I have in mind but you are also encouraged to browse my Research page to get a sense for my current interests.

Current PhD Students

• Weiwei Xie (Coadvised with Dean Johnson WSU Statistics 2022 - )
• Topic: Null models for time series entropy
• Phousawanh Peaungvongpakdy (WSU Mathematics 2022 - )
• Topic: Mathematical and computational democracy
• 2023-2024 GPSA Excellence Award as a Graduate Student Instructor

Graduated PhD Students

• Dr. Md. Mahedi Hasan (WSU Statistics 2022 - 2025 )
• Thesis: Inference, Aggregation, and Embedding for Learning Problems on Network and Time Series Data
• 2022-2023 GPSA Excellence Award as a Graduate Student Instructor
• 2023 President's Award for Leadership
• Currently a Postdoc at UW-Madison
• Dr. Swarnita Chakraborty (Coadvised with Jan Dasgupta WSU Statistics 2021 - 2023)
• Thesis: A Novel Approach to Multiple Hypothesis Testing Under Dependence and Insights for Inference on Random Dot Product Networks
• Nancy J. Robertson Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Mathematics for 2020-2021 academic year
• Mike Jacroux Book Award for the Best Student in Theoretical Statistics for 2019-2020 academic year
• Currently a Safety Statistician at Johnson & Johnson R&D

Current MS Students

• Jon Widen (WSU Statistics 2023 - )
• Topic: Distributions of Gaps in Sorted Data
• Currently a PhD student in Mathematics at WSU
• Garrett Kepler (WSU Statistics 2023 - )
• Topic: Sampling Spectrally Similar Graphs
• Currently a PhD student in Mathematics at WSU
• Publication: Algorithmic Accountability in Small Data: Sample-Size-Induced Bias Within Classification Metrics AISTATS25 with J. Briscoe, D. DeFord, and A. Gebremedhin.

Graduated MS Students

• Phousawanh Peaungvongpakdy (WSU Statistics 2022 - 2025)
• Topic: (Parallel Tempered) Short Burst Optimization for Redistricting
• Currently a PhD student in Mathematics at WSU
• Qingwei Qiao (WSU Statistics 2023 - 2024 )
• Topic: Do Social Network Strengths Affect Policy Interventions? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Madagascar
• Economist at Amazon
• Sahil Patil (WSU Statistics 2023 - 2024 )
• Topic: Impact of adapting annealing schedules on a pricing algorithm
• Research Scientist at Amazon Music
• Anastasia Vishnevskaya (WSU Statistics 2021 - 20212)
• Topic: Exploring China's Twiplomacy: Social Network and Sentiment Analysis of the `Chinese Embassy in the US' Twitter Account
• 2021-2022 GPSA Excellence Award as a Graduate Student Instructor
• Currently an Assistant Professor of Communications at Texas Tech

• James Asare (WSU Applied Mathematics 2020 - 2021)
• Topic: Analysis of Optimized Plans for School Redistricting
• 2022 University Wide Three Minute Thesis Competition Winner
• Currently a PhD candidate and research assistant in the WSU College of Education

Current Undergraduate Students

• Olivia McGrew (WSU Math 2024 - )
• Topic: Graph Theory, Markov chains, and computational redistricting

Former Undergraduate Students

• Eric Simpson (WSU Hacker Scholarship 2023)
• Topic: Dynamics of Voting Networks: Implications for Fairness, Representation, and Accountability
• Gray Award Winner SURCA 2023
• Best Poster Winner PiMUC 2023

• Kallie Distler (WSU CAS STEM RAMP 2022 - 2023)
• Topic: Null Models for Social Network Analysis of Elementary School Students
• Novice Award Winner SURCA 2023

• Zhiyaun (Freeman) Chen (WSU Data Analytics 2022)
• Topic: Spatial Influences on Vote Modeling Regression
• 2023 WSU Data Analytics Outstanding Senior

• Karthik Ayyalasomayajula (WSU Data Analytics 2022)
• Topic: Geo-Spatial Analysis of Ranked Choice Voting in Maine Congressional Elections

• Elliot Kimsey (WSU Ableson Scholarship 2021 - 2022)
• Topic: Malapportionment in Washington Dual Graphs and Multi-Balanced Redistricting
• 2023 Data Analytics Student Spotlight
• Publication: Multi-Balanced Redistricting, Journal of Computational Social Science, (to appear 2023).