URPS

Undergraduate Research in Probability and Statistics

About

The program is designed to give undergraduate students a chance to participate in meaningful research activities in the areas of probability and statistics. Another aim of the program is to give graduate students a different dimension of mentoring experience to what they experience as teaching assistants and collaborators with other graduate students. In this program, a graduate student is teamed with one or two undergraduate students and one faculty member. The graduate student will serve as a mentor as well as a collaborator of the undergraduate student(s).

Format

During one term (a semester or a summer) one or more undergraduate students will work together with one graduate students on a project devised jointly by the graduate student and a faculty member. The students will meet weekly with the supervising graduate student and sometimes the faculty member. The students, if there are more than one, can meet with each other more frequently. The PhD student will be paid $2500 for the mentorship. The undergraduate(s) will get 0.5 credit for independent study. If satisfactory progress is made, this arrangement can be continued for a second term.

Faculty advisors

Bhaswar Bhattacharya: http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~bhaswar/

Research Interests: nonparametric statistics, distribution-free inference, networks analysis, graphical models, statistical learning, combinatorial probability, discrete and computational geometry

Email: bhaswar@wharton.upenn.edu

Jiaoyang Huang: https://jiaoyang.github.io/

Research Interests: random matrices, random graphs, interacting particle systems, inverse problem, and statistical learning

Email: huangjy@wharton.upenn.edu

Robin Pemantle: https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~pemantle/

Research Interests: modern discrete probability and combinatorics

Email: pemantle@math.upenn.edu

Xin Sun: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/xinsun/

Research Interests: random geometry and statistical physics

Email: xinsun@sas.upenn.edu

Da Wu: https://sites.google.com/view/dawu

Research Interests: probability theory, mathematical physics, causal inference, time series analysis, and Applications of machine learning in Biomedical domains.

Email: dawu@sas.upenn.edu

Anderson Ye Zhang: http://andersonzhang.com/

Research Interests: spectral methods, clustering, ranking.

Email: ayz@wharton.upenn.edu

Eligibility

Undergraduate students across Penn are eligible to apply.

Graduate students at Penn from the Department of Mathematics, Department of Statistics, and Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (AMCS) program are eligible to apply.

Apply

For both undergraduate and graduate students, please send an email to all the faculty members that you are interested in working with. We will try our best to match. In your email please include

1. a short introduction of your background and interest.

2. the list of math and statistics courses that you have taken.

3. your CV.

Deadline for Spring 2024: 1/14/2024