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Professor and Graduate Program Director
Lily Wang is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Statistics, Long Nguyen and Kimmy Duong School of Computing, at George Mason University. She earned her Ph.D. in Statistics from Michigan State University in 2007. Prior to joining Mason in 2021, she held faculty positions at Iowa State University (2014-2021) and the University of Georgia (2007-2014).
Her primary areas of research include Nonparametric Modeling & Inference, Statistical Learning of Data with Complex Features, Functional Data Analysis, Spatiotemporal Data Analysis, Statistical Imaging, Biostatistics, and Uncertainty Quantification. Working at the interface of Statistics, Mathematics, and Computer Science, she is dedicated to developing advanced statistical ML/AI methodologies and theory for Data Science, Big Data Analytics, and Trustworthy AI. The methods she developed have been widely applied in engineering, neuroimaging, epidemiology, environmental studies, economics, and biomedical science.
Dr. Wang is a fellow of both the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). She is currently serving on the editorial board of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (2020-), Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2024-), Statistica Sinica (2023-), Journal of Nonparametric Statistics (2019-), and Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (2018-). She is also the 2025 Chair-Elect of ASA Nonparametric Statistics Section.
Dr. Wang has served as a Financial Economist IPA Fellow at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and as a Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, where she contributed her expertise in the development and evaluation of advanced statistical methodologies and data science techniques. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Wang led a research team at Iowa State University on COVID-19 modeling and forcasting. Their model was selected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to support national and state-level projections, providing critical insights for real-time public health decisions.
Dr. Wang's research has been published in top-tier statistical and interdisciplinary journals, including Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Applied Statistics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA (PNAS). Her research on statistics theory, methods, and applications has been funded by various federal agencies, including NSF, NIH, SEC, and BLS.
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Contact Information
Email: lwang41@gmu.edu Phone (O): (703) 993-9116
Office: Department of Statistics, 1721 Nguyen Engineering Building, George Mason University
Mailing Address: 4400 University Drive, MSN 4A7, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA