Theresa is a second year PhD student in the department working on characterizing the morphologies of precancerous cells using modern statistical methods like random forests. Currently, she is focusing on analyzing cells from patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, an inherited disease involving a mutation in a tumor suppressor gene. Recent awards include a 2018 Honorable Mention in the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, 1st place in the 2018 Scientific and Public Affairs Advisory Committee Statistical Significance Poster Competition at the national Joint Statistical Meetings, and Best in Show at the 2018 CMU HackAuton.

Ronald Yurko is a second year PhD student in the department working on developing methodology for behavioral data science or how people interact with and generate populations of data analysis workflows. His current work is largely centered on analyzing how students visualize and write about data using a mixture models adapted for use with text and circular data. Ron is also very active in sports analytics and has built multiple software packages (e.g. nflscrapR) used across the country that promote reproducibility and replicability. He is a frequent conference speaker and workshop presenter and a member of several honor societies.