Email: bol’at’wustl.edu
Education:
- Ph.D. in Statistics, Texas A&M University, Aug. 2006
- M.S. in Statistics, Texas A&M University, May. 2004.
- M.S. in Ship and Ocean Engineering Fluid Mechanics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
- B.S. in Naval Architecture & Ocean Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Minor in Industrial Foreign Trade, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
I completed a two-year postdoctoral appointment as a Postgraduate Scientist at the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. In 2008, I joined the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. I moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2013. Most recently, in 2024, I transitioned to Washington University in St. Louis, where I currently hold a Stanley A. Sawyer Professorship in Statistics and Data Science. During my tenure at UIUC, I was a Marjorie Roberts Professor and also had held the Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar, Office of Risk Management & Insurance Research (ORMIR) Faculty Scholar, and Data Science Founder Professorial Scholar. Additionally, I chaired the department from 2019 to 2024.
Research Interests:
- Methods
- Univariate and multivariate spatio-temporal data modeling
- Bayesian hierarchical modeling
- Functional data methods
- Changepoint for spatially indexed data
- Spatial extremes
- Machine learning methods
- Copula
- Applications
- Climatology and atmospheric science including climate change, climate model evaluation and paleoclimate reconstruction
- Public health such as HIV, vector-born disease, and heat wave related human morbidity
- Environmental sciences including water, ecology, agriculture, forestry, etc.