I’m an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco, appointed jointly in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Master’s in Data Science Program.
I started teaching in 2014, as an ESL teacher (外国語指導助手) at Nishinomiya Imazu Senior High School in Japan. Since then I’ve taught statistics, math, and data science at UC Davis and USF, and I advise graduate practicum teams working with partner organizations each year.
My research is in functional and longitudinal data analysis, the statistics of data that arrive as curves, trajectories, or shapes (or fragments thereof). My methodological work focuses on modeling functional and distributional data, specifically warping and registration problems for multivariate or object-valued functional data, where each component, or each part of an object, can run on its own internal clock. I am currently extending these ideas to trajectories on curved spaces, building piecewise geodesic models for bird migration routes across the globe.
I also work as an applied statistician and data scientist. I tend to think of this practice as a kind of translation: finding clear ways to make sense of results and bridge the gap between statisticians and other scientists. Many of these collaborations involve functional data, and they often motivate my methodological questions. I currently work with conservationists at The Nature Conservancy, auditory researchers at UC San Diego, ecologists and psychologists at UC Davis, clinicians at UCSF, and environmental scientists at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. Other collaborations include ophthalmologists at Stanford Medicine, veterinarians at the San Diego Zoo, the Gates Foundation, and the researchers behind Mt. Everest’s Himalayan Database.
Most of my working hours are at a screen, so I get outside when I can, usually road tripping or camping at music festivals around Northern California.