Department of Statistics Welcomes New Faculty for 2025-26 Academic Year
09-05-2025
The Department of Statistics is proud to welcome four new faculty members whose expertise strengthens the department’s teaching, research, and outreach.
Ernest Aboagye joins Purdue as a Senior Lecturer (75% Math, 25% Statistics) from Georgia State University’s Greenberg School of Risk Science, where he earned a PhD in risk management and insurance. His research develops advanced statistical tools for Value-at-Risk forecasting and actuarial risk analysis, with publications in the European Journal of Operational Research and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. Aboagye’s work advances quantitative methods for managing volatility, systemic risk, and reinsurance design. With professional experience as an actuary, he looks forward to combining teaching and research to prepare the next generation of risk professionals.
Heejong Bong, a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Statistics, specializes in causal inference for data with complex dependence structures, including longitudinal and network data. This emerging area has wide applications in public health and the social sciences. In addition, Bong has conducted research on spatiotemporal latent factor methods, graphical models, high-dimensional central limit theorems, and ranking from pairwise comparisons.
Shimeng Huang joins Purdue as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Actuarial Science with a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics(75%) and the Department of Mathematics(25%). She earned her PhD in insurance economics and actuarial analytics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores the intersection of climate risk, catastrophic events, insurance analytics, machine learning, and dependence modeling.
Walid Sharabati brings expertise in applied and computational statistics, machine learning, and data science to his role as Assistant Professor of Practice. His research interests include social network analysis, image processing, denoising and super-resolution, natural language processing, and large language models. Sharabati also develops the data science behind digital assistants. He will contribute to the department’s online applied statistics program and the university’s data science program.
About the Department of Statistics at Purdue University
Our mission is to advance the frontiers of statistical sciences and data science in both theory and applications; to provide learning environments that produce well-educated data scientists, statisticians, probabilists, and quantitatively literate people; and to join with others in bringing the strengths of the statistical sciences to address societal needs. The Department offers the degrees of Bachelor of Science, Graduate Certificate, Master of Science, Online Master of Applied Statistics, and Ph.D. in Statistics. Our programs prepare students for careers in both industry and academia and prepare them to be leaders in their fields. The Department of Statistics is part of the College of Science at Purdue University and is housed in the Mathematical Sciences Building in West Lafayette, Indiana. Learn more about the department at stat.purdue.edu.
Writer: Alisha Willett, amwillet@purdue.edu
Sources: Ernest Aboagye eaboagye@purdue.edu, Heejong Bong bong0@purdue.edu, Shimeng Huang shimengh@purdue.edu, Walid Sharabati wsharaba@purdue.edu