On September 25th, 2026, SDS hosted our second annual ASA Statistics Day. This event was sponsored by the American Statistical Association (ASA) and by the Washington University Department of Statistics & Data Science.
The program included talks, a discussion panel, networking, a walk around campus, and a poster competition. Speakers, panelists, and judges included Xuming He (WashU), Sounak Chakraborty (University of Missouri–Columbia), Joe Feldman (WashU), Kenan Li (Saint Louis University), Craig Rolling (HNTB Corporation), Adam Schapaugh (Bayer), Linying Zhang (WashU), Justin Van Wart (National Agricultural Statistics Service), Hanxiao Jing (Bayer), and Eun Heui Kim (Missouri S&T). The discussion panel was chaired by SDS PhD students Vedul Palavajjhala and Braxten Jones.
After lunch and networking, SDS PhD student Youlin Zhang led a tour to some of Danforth campuses' interesting landmarks before leading the group to the Danforth University Center for the poster competition.
The winner of the poster competition was Yi Luo, fourth-year PhD student in Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. The poster title was “Convergence of Expected Suboptimality and Asymptotic Distribution of ADAM-Type Optimizers,” by Yi Luo, Haoyang Liu, and Ran Chen.
The event was chaired by Debashis Mondal (WashU), President of the St. Louis Chapter of the ASA. It was jointly organized by the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Washington University in St. Louis, the WashU ASA Student Chapter, the Mid-Missouri Chapter of the ASA, and the St. Louis Chapter of the ASA. We would like to extend a special thank you to Liz Ryan, Events Specialist in Arts & Sciences, and our PhD student volunteers who helped the day run smoothly!
