Today is my 40th birthday, and I had a very special treat for it -- getting to meet one of my idols, Dr. Jianqin Fan! Dr. Fan's papers on SCAD penalty and sure independence screening for high-dimensional data were among the first papers I read as a PhD student. So inspiring!

Turning 40 in a week (!). Here are some old photos of me when I was 30-31 yrs old and much more fit/30 pounds lighter. Need to get back into shape, maybe join a local running group again!

I'm pleased to share that my single-authored paper "Bayesian group regularization in generalized linear models with a continuous spike-and-slab prior" has been accepted for publication in Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics! Link: raybai.net/wp-content/u...

Our paper, "Quantifying predictive uncertainty of aphasia severity in stroke patients with sparse heteroscedastic Bayesian high-dimensional regression," has been accepted for publication in Computational Statistics! Read it here: raybai.net/wp-content/u...

Going to be back at University of South Carolina November 4-5 for my Honors thesis student Leah's defense! Excited to see her exceptional work on Bayesian modeling of maternal mortality with suppressed data (a challenging project that she tackled very well). Hope to catch up with folks!

University of Florida crew now at George Mason University Statistics Dept! Ray Bai (PhD student at UF from 2014-2018), Brenda Betancourt (Assistant Professor at UF from 2018-2022), and Abolfazl Safikhani (Assistant Professor at UF from 2019-2022). Small world!

It's official now. My new faculty page at @georgemasonu.bsky.social is now up: statistics.gmu.edu/profiles/rbai2

@uofscstatistics.bsky.social has a *second* TT Assistant Professor position for Fall 2026 available. Applicants with research experience in causal inference, reinforcement learning, probabilistic graphical models, or sequential & adaptive decision-making are especially encouraged to apply.

My previous employer, the University of South Carolina Department of Statistics, has a new opening for a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position with a start date of August 16, 2026. This is a great place to work! Apply by November 17, 2025 for full consideration.

Had such a great time at our going away get-together tonight! We are so grateful for the friends we made in Columbia, SC. We will be back to visit again. Come visit us in DC! ❤️

Last day in the office at USC, and my advisees came to meet with me one last time! My Senior Honors thesis student Leah, my Summer REU student Evan, & my PhD students Fanghua and Sijian. So fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with outstanding students at USC. #professor #proudadvisor

Last week on University of South Carolina's campus. I will be in the office on Friday for some final in-person meetings and for some final orders of business. If you're at USC on Fri., please come say goodbye!

#IPAM (the institute for pure and applied mathematics) is facing a critical shortfall for operating expenses due to an unexpected suspension of NSF funding www.ipam.ucla.edu/news/nsf-fun... . Donations for emergency continuity of operations funding can be made at giving.ucla.edu/Campaign/Donat

I have some related posts on this at mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568... and mathstodon.xyz/deck/@tao/11...

New preprint "Parameter expanded variational Bayes for well-calibrated high-dimensional linear regression with spike-and-slab priors"! Read the full paper here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Today is my last "official" day at University of South Carolina. Next month, I will be moving to the D.C. area and continuing my academic career at George Mason University. However, I really cherish my time as a faculty member at USC. #ForeverToThee Read my full post here: tinyurl.com/4fpzjeru

Thank you for all of the support the last few years, @uofscstatistics.bsky.social. I will greatly cherish my time as a faculty member at USC where I got to collaborate with great colleagues, teach and mentor excellent students, and grow as a researcher and educator!

"A Unified Three-State Model Framework for Analysis of Treatment Crossover in Survival Trials" (with my former PhD student Zile Zhao and our co-authors) was published in the most recent issue of Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1080/1946...

Hard at work this summer before the Fall semester begins. Another new preprint "BiSSLB: Binary spike-and-slab biclustering for binary datasets" with my PhD student Sijian Fan should be available in the next few weeks!

Another new preprint coming soon, hopefully in the next few weeks! This is work from the summer REU that I supervised this past summer. The undergrad students did a great job on this!

New preprint coming soon! Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable approach for conducting Bayesian variable selection when p>>n, but the standard mean-field CAVI algorithm results in poorly calibrated predictions. We introduce a novel parameter-expanded sheme to correct this issue.

The Summer REU I'm supervising wraps up next week! My students did an excellent job studying spatial models for disease mapping and causal inference, and implementing these models on real public health data from North Carolina! Looking forward to their final report and presentation!

Celebrating 8 years of #love and #pride! Happy Pride Month! 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🏳️‍🌈

I had a truly lovely time at BNP 14: the 14th International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics at UCLA this past week! I gave a talk, listened to many interesting talks, & chatted with a number of folks. This was my first time attending a BNP conference -- I'll definitely attend again in future!

I'm headed to Los Angeles, CA today to attend the BNP 14 Conference on Bayesian nonparametrics at UCLA! I will be in L.A. this whole upcoming week. Please feel free to reach out if you would like to meet up!

(1/2) My summer REU students did such a great job! They used county-level data and a Bayesian conditional autoregressive (CAR) model to estimate the North Carolina counties' relative risks for COPD ED visits. Not an easy project for undergrads but they did it! (cont...)

Excited to give a talk for Merck Oncology this Friday! I'll be talking about my work with my former PhD student Zile Zhao on treatment switching in survival trials. I hope that the research team at Merck finds our statistical framework useful for their clinical trials!

If anyone is attending the IISA 2025 Conference at U. Nebraska-Lincoln this week, check out Session 04.M2.I72: Recent advances in high-dimensional modeling on Sun., Jun 15, 10:45 am-12:15 pm! My recent work on Bayesian VAR models (w/ Partha Sarkar of FSU) will be presented then!

Our paper "Sparse high-dimensional linear mixed modeling with a partitioned empirical Bayes ECM algorithm" in Statistics and Computing is now available online! Read at the link below. 👇 Link: doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Excited to work with summer REU students for the next 6 weeks! We will use statistical methods to create beautiful maps of both estimated disease prevalences and counterfactual prevalences under a spatial causal model.

Although I'm moving to GMU at end of July, I'm still so excited to be leading a 6-week summer REU at UofSC starting this Monday! I'll be working on spatial causal inference models for disease mapping with a small team of undergrad researchers. Excited to see what we can accomplish. :)

Some other good news! My paper "Sparse high-dimensional linear mixed modeling with a partitioned empirical Bayes ECM algorithm" (with Anja Zgodic, Jiajia Zhang, Peter Olejua, and Alexander McLain) has been accepted by Statistics and Computing! Link to paper: tinyurl.com/yu2f8rrv

✨Some news!✨ I have decided to accept a new faculty position at George Mason University, starting this August! I'm looking forward to moving to the Washington D.C. area and continuing my research at GMU. I greatly valued my time as faculty in @uofscstatistics.bsky.social! Forever to thee!

New paper (with Qingyang Liu, Shijie Wang, and Dipankar Bandyopadhyay)! Motivated by periodontal studies, we introduce a new neural network-based robust single-index model. Our method is suitable for skewed and heavy-tailed data. Read the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.02153

Congrats to my student Sijian for being one of the winners for Best Student Talk at the SC-ASA Palmetto Symposium today! I really enjoyed all of the student talks. Keep up the great work!

New preprint coming out later this month! I'm excited for this work, as I have been continuing to explore deep learning for challenging statistical problems - both from methodological/theoretical and applied perspectives.

Prof. David Hitchcock was recently promoted to Full Professor of Statistics! 🎉🥳Here he is at the @uofsccas.bsky.social Tenure & Promotion reception. Dr. Hitchcock is currently Director of the Graduate program, has co-authored over 50 articles, and has supervised over 30 PhD+MS theses!

New paper by Dr. Christopher McMahan (PhD '12), Prof. Joshua Tebbs, and their co-authors, "A mixed-effects Bayesian regression model for multivariate group testing data," has been published in the most recent issue of Biometrics! Read the paper below. academic.oup.com/biometrics/a...

I had a great time participating in this virtual panel yesterday! We had over 60 people in attendance from the U.S., Canada, and U.K.! Always happy to help out (aspiring) PhD students and junior faculty in any way that I can.

Virtual panel discussion "Academic Job Search for (Bio)statistics Faculty and Postdoc Positions" happening THIS Tuesday, April 1, at 3:30 PM EST! Below are the details for joining the event. Zoom Meeting: lnkd.in/evxiJbPq ID: 943 5676 5580 Passcode: 362974

Really enjoying supervising a student on her Senior Honors Thesis. We came up with a novel approach for estimating maternal mortality rates in SC counties with suppressed data. She learned all about Bayesian hierarhical models, CAR models, and model-fitting in Stan! We will try to publish this work.

Congrats to Prof. William Consagra and his co-authors! Their paper "A deep learning approach to multi-fiber parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in diffusion MRI" has been accepted by Medical Image Analysis! 🎉🥳 Read the paper here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking forward to taking part in this panel discussion on Tue, April 1, 3:30-4:30 PM about the academic job search. Everyone is welcome to join on Zoom! Add this to your calendar if you're interested! Zoom Meeting: lnkd.in/evxiJbPq ID: 943 5676 5580 Passcode: 362974

✨FACULTY SPOTLIGHT✨ Congratulations to Prof. Brian Habing for winning the USC Educational Foundation Outstanding Service Award! Dr. Habing currently serves as Director of the Data Science & Data Analytics program and was previously Director of the Undergraduate Statistics Program. Read more below!

Update: I'll be giving a seminar talk for this oncology research group in June, a few days before I head to L.A. for the BNP 14 World Meeting. The first time I'm giving an invited research talk for industry (bio)statisticians!

Always great to hear when others want to apply my methods in practice! My multivariate Bayesian model has been used by epidemiologists for exposome analysis. Now statisticians in oncology clinical trials are interested in my work on treatment switching with my student Zile Zhao (PhD '25)!

Prof. Ting Fung Ma and his co-authors' article "Spatiotemporal Causal Inference With Mechanistic Ecological Models: Evaluating Targeted Culling on Chronic Wasting Disease Dynamics in Cervids" has appeared in the most recent issue of Environmentrics! Link below👇 doi.org/10.1002/env....

I'm at Wake Forest University today! Looking forward to meeting with faculty and students in the Department of Statistical Sciences here.

Best of luck to my PhD student Zile Zhao who's starting his new job at Moffitt Cancer Center today! He'll do a great job!

Excited to visit the Wake Forest University Department of Statistical Sciences next Tuesday to present my recent work on Bayesian survival analysis!