Yulia R. Gel

Research Interests

• Statistical foundation of data science; machine learning; topological and geometric methods in statistics; topological data analysis
• Graph mining; inference for random graphs and complex networks: uncertainty quantification in network analysis, bootstrap on networks, network motif and tensor analysis, data depth on networks
• Time series analysis; spatio-temporal processes; time series of graphs
• Climate informatics; healthcare predictive analytics

I am a member of the NSF EarthCube Research Coordination Network on the Intelligent Systems for Geosciences community (IS-GEO RCN).

Publications

List of my publications is available at Google Scholar.

Professional Training

• Saint Petersburg State University, Russia — Mathematics, MSc, 1997 (summa cum laude)
• Saint Petersburg State University, Russia — Mathematics, PhD, 2000
• University of Washington, USA — Statistics, Postdoc, 2001–2003

Past Appointments

• Assistant/Associate Professor (with tenure) (2004–2014) — Department of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences, University of Waterloo, Canada

Selected Visiting Positions

• Visiting Researcher (07/2016–06/2017) — NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech, USA
• Research Fellow (07/2016–12/2016) — The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK
• Visiting Associate Professor (2011–2013) — Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Visiting Assistant Professor (01/2009–06/2009) – University of California at Berkeley, USA
• Visiting Assistant Professor (08/2003–08/2004) — George Washington University, USA

Selected Honors

• 2018 The ASA Statistics and the Environment Distinguished Achievement Medal
• 2014 Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA)
• 2014 Abdel El-Shaarawi Young Researcher's Award from the International Environmetrics Society (TIES) of the International Statistics Institute
• 2004 JASA Applications and Case Studies Invited Paper of the Year
• 1999 The PhD Fellowship for the top PhD students from the Government of the Russian Federation
• 1997–1999 The Graduate Research Scholarship from the Government of Saint Petersburg, Russia
• 1997 Graduate Research Excellence Award, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia

Active External Research Grants

• 2020–2021 NASA 20-RRNES20-0021 Rapid Response and Novel Research in Earth Science: Forecasting COVID-19 progression and the next hotspot: Do weather conditions and air quality impact COVID-19 transmission rates and clinical severity? (PI, joint with Michael J. Garay, Krzysztof M. Gorski, Huikyo Lee, NASA JPL and Ignacio Segovia, UT Dallas).
• 2020–2021 NSF DMS 2027793/2027802 RAPID: Collaborative Research: Operational COVID-19 Forecasting with Multi-Source Information (PI, joint with Georgiy Bobashev, Research Triangle Institute).
• 2019–2022 NSF DMS 1925346 ATD: Topological Data Analysis for Threat Detection (PI, joint with Murat Kantarcioglu, CS UTD).
• 2018–2020 NSF ECCS 1824716/1824710, EAGER: Collaborative Research: Local Topological Properties of Power Flow Networks, and Their Role in Power System Functionality (PI, joint with Vince Poor, EE Princeton).
• 2018–2019 NSF DMS 1841312, 2018 NSF PIs Workshop for the Algorithms for Modern Power Systems (AMPS) Program.
• 2017–2020 NSF DMS 1736368/1736417 AMPS: Collaborative Research: Analysis of Local Power Grid Properties: from Network Motifs to Tensors (PI, joint with Vince Poor, EE Princeton).
• 2016–2020 NSF IIS 1633331/1633355 BIGDATA: IA: Collaborative Research: Novel Bootstrap Procedures for Efficient Large Social Network Analysis; PI, joint with Murat Kantarcioglu, CS UTD and Vyacheslav Lyubchich, UMCES.
• 2019–2020 Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) Multiple Peril Maps and Uncertainty Quantification for Climate Induced Risks in Agricultural Insurance with Deep Learning and Climate Model Ensembles; PI, joint with Vyacheslav Lyubchich, UMCES, and Nathaniel Newlands, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
• 2016–2021 Simons Foundation, Nonparametric Inference for Random Networks and Graphs, PI.

Since starting a tenure-track position at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2004, my research has been continuously supported by external grants from NSERC, SSHRC, MITACS, GeoConnections of Natural Resources of Canada, Intact Foundation, Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and other funding agencies and industrial partners.

Editorial Boards

• January 2021 – present — Associate Editor for the Electronic Journal of Statistics
• August 2018 – present — Associate Editor for Technometrics
• July 2017 — Guest Co-Editor for the Special Issue "Advances in Statistical Methods and Applications for Climate Change and Environment" in Statistics & Probability Letters
• January 2014 – present — Associate Editor for Environmetrics
• January 2013 – December 2021 — Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Statistics
• August 2008 – December 2014 — Associate Editor for Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry (ASMBI)

Selected Recent Professional Activities

• Co-Organizer of 2021 NSF Student Conference on COVID modeling
• Co-Organizer of the 2020, 2019 and 2018 NSF PIs Workshops for the Algorithms for Modern Power Systems (AMPS) Program
• Co-Organizer of the 2019 SAMSI Workshop Foundations on Blockchain Data Analytics
• Co-Organizer of the 5-day workshop "Synthesis of Statistics, Data Mining and Environmental Sciences in Pursuit of Knowledge Discovery”, the Banff Int. Research Station (BIRS) for Math. Innovation and Discovery, Canada & Casa Matematica Oaxaca (CMO), Oaxaca, Mexico, November 2017
• Co-organizer of the International Workshops on the Perspectives on High-Dimensional Data Analysis, HDDA VI and HDDA VII
• Program Committee for 17th SIAM Int. Conf. on Data Mining (SDM 2017) Workshop on Mining Big Data in Climate and Environment, Climate Informatics CI 2017 and CI 2016.
• Co-Organizer of the 5-day workshop "Recent Advances and Trends in Time Series Analysis: Nonlinear Time Series, High Dimensional Inference and Beyond”, the Banff Int. Research Station (BIRS) for Math. Innovation and Discovery, Canada & Casa Matematica Oaxaca (CMO), Banff, Canada, April 2014

Selected Current External Professional Committees/Boards

• 2019–2023 — President-Elect and President of the International Environmetrics Society (TIES) of International Statistical Institute (ISI)
• 2017–2019 — Member of the American Statistical Association on Energy Statistics, joint with DOE EIA
• 2013–2019 — Treasurer of the International Environmetrics Society (TIES) of International Statistical Institute (ISI)

Statistical Software Distribution

• R package snowboot: Bootstrap Methods for Network Inference. Ramirez Ramirez, L. L., Nezafati, K., Lyubchich, V., Chen Y., Gel, Y.R.
• R package funtimes: Functions for Time Series Analysis. Lyubchich, V., Gel, Y.R.
• R package lawstat: Tools for Biostatistics, Public Policy, and Law. Gastwirth, G.L., Gel, Y.R., Hui, W., Lyubchich, V., Miao, W., Noguchi, N. (in alphabetic order)
• R package nparLD: Nonparametric Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Factorial Experiments. Noguchi, N., Latif, M., Thangavelu, K., Konietschke, F., Gel, Y.R., and E. Brunner.
• R package ProbForecastGOP: Probabilistic Weather Field Forecast using the Geostatistical Output Perturbation (GOP) method. Berrocal, V.J., Gel, Y.R., Raftery, A.E., and T. Gneiting.

Teaching

Recent Courses at UTD

• STAT 6348 Applied Multivariate Analysis F18
• STAT 6390 Statistical Network Analysis, S17
• STAT 7338 Time Series Modeling & Filtering, S19
• CS/SE/STAT 3341 Probability and Statistics in Computer Science and Software Engineering S20
• STAT 6347 Applied Time Series Analysis, S20
• STAT 7331 Multivariate Analysis, F19