Research

_{At JSM 2025 in Nashville}

My research mainly concerns models for surveys and small area estimation, and methods for evaluating them in settings where there’s no ground truth. Small area estimation methods are what let us answer questions like “what is the childhood poverty rate in county X?” even when local survey data is too sparse to estimate directly.

Some of my interests include:

• Small Area Estimation
• Survey Sampling & Nonprobability Samples
• Model Validation under No-Truth Scenarios
• Areal/Discrete Spatial Modeling
• Bayesian Methods

I am co-advised by Zehang Li and Paul Parker.

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Updates

August 2026:

• New preprint (with a big group of collaborators!): Nonprobability Samples for Small Area Estimation: A Review and Comparative Simulation Study.
• Access the arXiv preprint here

April 2026:

• We have new preprint on how we can use Data Thinning for principled validation of Small Area Estimation models. This was a really rewarding and fascinating project to work on.
• Access the arXiv preprint here
• Slides on this paper presented at UW’s STAB group
• Code available here

May 2025:

• My first dissertation project was published in the The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (JRSS-A)!
  • Spatially Selected and Dependent Random Effects for Small Area Estimation with Application to Rent Burden, JRSS-A, 189(3), pp. 1308–1324.
  • Access the publication here.
  • Presented the paper at JSM 2024 in Portland (link to slides).
• This paper won the Wray Jackson Smith Scholarship from the Government and Social Statistics Sections of the ASA
• Code available here