University of Chicago statistics professor Rina Foygel Barber receives MacArthur 'genius grant'
CHICAGO (CBS) -- University of Chicago statistics professor Rina Foygel Barber was the recipient Wednesday of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship – also known as a "genius grant."
The grant, the U of C notes, is given each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to recognize scholars across academic disciplines who "show exceptional creativity in their work." Recipients receive $800,000 – paid in quarterly installments over five years, the U of C said.
Barber serves as the Louis Block Professor of Statistics at UChicago, and is being recognized for her work designing ways to better handle data sets that are large or imperfect, the U of C said.
Barber focuses in particular on quantifying the uncertainty of results of a data analysis – which helps people decide what they should do with the analysis output, and when to say the data at hand can't reliably answer a specific question, the U of C said.
"These questions are particularly important in the many data-driven fields that rely on constantly evolving algorithms and models, such as healthcare (e.g., predicting patient risk of adverse events), social media (e.g., recommending who to connect with or what news articles to read), finance (e.g., predicting how the market will behave), and many more," Barber said in a U of C news release.
Barber focuses in particular on "high-dimensional" datasets, in which there are many different variables involved. One example would be a population health dataset – which might include age, height, blood pressure, preexisting conditions, and other variables, the U of C noted.
Barber and a collaborator created a technique for reducing the likelihood of false positives when machine learning is applied to a high-dimensional dataset.
With this technique, researchers in fields from health care to climate science and astronomical imaging can improve their data analysis.
Barber hopes to use the award to build research collaborations within UChicago and across institutions, offer students opportunities to go to conferences, and work on her authorship of a textbook on distribution-free interference, the U of C said.
Barber received an ScB from Brown University in 2005, and an MS in 2009 and Ph.D. in 2012 from the U of C. She was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in 2012 and 2013 before joining the University of Chicago Department of Statistics.
