The Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Council approved the appointment of Annie Qu as IMS program secretary for the term of Sept. 8, 2021 to Aug. 14, 2024, as recommended by the Committee to Select Administrative Officers. Qu is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine.

Qu’s research focuses on solving fundamental issues regarding structured and unstructured large-scale data, and developing cutting-edge statistical methods and theory in machine learning and algorithms on personalized medicine, text mining, recommender systems, medical imaging data and network data analyses for complex heterogeneous data. The newly developed methods are able to extract essential and relevant information from large volume high-dimensional data. 

Her research has impacts in many fields such as biomedical studies, genomic research, public health research, social and political sciences. Before she joined UCI, Qu was Data Science Founder Professor of Statistics, and the director of the Illinois Statistics Office, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her Ph.D. in statistics from the Pennsylvania State University. She was awarded the Brad and Karen Smith Professorial Scholar by the College of LAS at UIUC, was a recipient of an NSF Career award in 2004-09, and is a Fellow of IMS and ASA.

Story originally published in the August 2021 issue of the IMS Bulletin.