Ming Yuan, assistant professor for the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), has been named winner of the 2008-2009 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. Yuan received this award for his exemplary work in sparse modeling and estimation with high-dimensional data.

The NSF offers this prestigious award as part of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

"Ming is one of the best statisticians of his generation," said Jeff Wu, Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics at ISyE. "He is among the few who can do deep theoretical work and significant scientific applications."

Professor Ming Yuan is the third NSF CAREER Award winner in the statistics/quality group at the Stewart School of ISyE in the last three years. He joins the ranks of Professor Roshan Vengazhiyil, who received the award in 2006, and Professor Nagi Gebraeel, who received the award in 2007.

Yuan was also named as a Distinguished Cancer Scholar from the Georgia Cancer Coalition in 2007. He is using statistical methods with new technologies to decipher useful information that is often hidden in the variation of the data. In the study of breast cancer, he is developing novel computation and mathematical approaches using a wide variety of data sources in order to stratify breast cancer into biologically distinct types and correlate them with outcome and therapy response. Yuan has developed revolutionary bioinformatics techniques to successfully address questions related to aging and diabetes.

He also received the John van Rysin Award in 2004 from the International Biometrics Society in addition to numerous noteworthy publications. His research interests include data mining and machine learning, bioinformatics and computation biology, nonparametric and semi-parametric statistical methods, Bayesian and empirical Bayes methods, and econometrics and financial statistics.

Yuan holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Information Science and an M.S. in Probability and Statistics and Computer Science; he earned his Ph.D. in Statistics at University of Wisconsin.