Seven junior faculty members are leading exciting research projects and preparing the next great generation of statisticians.

Phil Deming received his PhD in Educational Psychology from Mizzou and has recently transitioned to being a full-time faculty with the Department of Statistics.

“During the last year I’ve had the opportunity to not only teach full time but to also advise undergraduate students, as well as to meet with prospective statistics majors who are visiting campus. It was a great opportunity to get to know these outstanding students I otherwise would not get a chance to meet.

I am enjoying the transition from my previous position as Director of the Learning Center and part time instructor to being a full-time faculty member.”

Nick Grieshop completed his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at Clemson University but returned to school and received his PhD in Statistics at Mizzou and joined the department as an assistant professor the following year.

“I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to teach classes on sports statistics and applied models.”

Mitchell Krock was born in St. Louis and is very excited to move back to Missouri and join the Department of Statistics this fall! He was recently a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne National Laboratory (Mathematics and Computer Science Division, advised by Julie Bessac and Mihai Anitescu) and Rutgers University (Statistics department, advised by Michael Stein). He completed his PhD in 2020 at University of Colorado-Boulder (Applied Mathematics department, advised by Will Kleiber) and Bachelor's degree at Bradley University (Mathematics department). His research interests include spatial statistics, extreme value theory, optimization, and machine learning.

Suman Majumder received his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from NC State in 2020 and went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for three years before joining University of Missouri-Columbia in Fall 2023. His primary research interest is spatial and spatiotemporal modeling with application in environmental, agricultural, ecological, and microbiome research. He also works on statistical computing and big data methods. He recently presented his works in the Southern Regional Council of Statistics Summer Research Conference 2024 and was presented with a travel award.

Matthew McIntosh has been in clinical research for almost 3 decades and brings this real-world experience to the classroom. His four adult children and granddaughter live in the St Louis area where he moved from prior to moving to Columbia. By his enthusiasm that he brings to the department, we can tell that he loves his new career.

Wilson Wright recently finished his PhD in statistics at Colorado State University where his research focused on developing new Bayesian methods for spatial models in ecology and environmental science. He was born and raised in Columbia — so he is looking forward to returning to his hometown and joining the Department of Statistics at MU.

Likun Zhang received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 2020 and has been with Mizzou since 2022. He was named as the 2024 College of Arts & Sciences Assistant Professor of the Year earlier this year. His research interests include extreme value theory, spatial extremes, Bayesian hierarchical models, weather processes and climatology, and deep learning. He also collaborates with other domain scientists to work on research problems related to Linguistics and Neural Psychology.