Dr. Staci Hepler, Associate Professor at Wake Forest University and 2015 graduate of the Statistics Ph.D. program at Ohio State, received an Early Investigator Award from the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment at the Joint Statistical Meetings earlier this month. The citation for her award reads:

"For new statistical methods in spatial ecology, expanding the reach of space-time occupancy models to higher dimensions and single-survey settings; for contributions in methodology to support spatial epidemiology, with public health applications to fight opioid abuse and better direct health resource allocation; and for advances in computational statistics, to extend the reach of high dimensional spatio-temporal models to larger data sets."