I am Professor of Statistics and Professor of Forestry and Natural Resources, and have a split appointment with Department of Statistics (75%) and Department of Forestry and Natural Resources (25%). This joint appointment facilitates interdisciplinary research and provides me access to various applications in forestry, agriculture and natural resources. Those applications in turn shape my methodological research in statistics. I strongly believe that methodological research and applications mutually enhance each other.
I employ probabilistic, statistical and computational theory and tools in my research. Since the research problems I deal with range from very applied to highly theoretical ones, my students have the choice of the kind of problems they wish to study. Some has worked on methodology and derived interesting asymptotic results; Some focused on the computational algorithms; and others may focus on specific applications.My current research is primarily in the analysis of spatial and space-time data. These kinds of data are being observed in many fields such as climatology, geophysics, geology, natural resources, agriculture, health sciences, economics and marketing. Technological advances have made it feasible to collect and archive space-time data at large scales that were not possible in just a decade ago. These massive and correlated data create challenging and interesting statistical problems, and demand innovative computational and methodological research.