Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice, has been awarded the 2020 Zellner Medal from the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).
The medal recognizes ISBA members who have "rendered exceptional service to ISBA over an extended period of time, with a long-lasting impact."
Vannucci joined Rice's faculty in 2007, served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 2014 to 2019 and holds an adjunct appointment in biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She earned her doctorate in statistics from the University of Florence in 1996 and taught at Texas A&M University for nine years before joining Rice.
Her research interests include Bayesian statistics, variable selection, graphical models, statistical computing and wavelets, with applications in genomics, neuroimaging and engineering.
Vannucci is co-editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association — Theory and Methods and has served as editor-in-chief of the ISBA journal Bayesian Analysis and as co-editor of Stat, an electronic journal of the International Statistical Institute.
She is a fellow of ISBA, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Zellner Medal is named for Arnold Zellner, an American economist and statistician who performed pioneering research in Bayesian analysis and econometric modeling.
– Patrick Kurp is a science writer in Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering.