Nathan Cheng and Xiaodong Yang Receive 2026 Dempster Award

The Department of Statistics would like to congratulate Nathan Cheng and Xiaodong Yang, PhD students in their 4th year, on winning the 2026 Department of Statistics Dempster Award!

Nathan received the award for his paper on "Chiseling: Powerful and Valid Subgroup Selection via Interactive Machine Learning," co-authored with Prof. Lucas Janson and Asher Spector, a ’21 A.B. alum.

Xiaodong received the award for his paper on "Fundamental Limits of Community Detection from Multi-view Data: Multi-layer, Dynamic and Partially Labeled Block Models," co-authored with Prof. Subhabrata Sen and Buyu Lin, a ’24 PhD alum.

In addition, we would like to acknowledge that we received many high-quality paper submissions from our PhD students for the 2026 Dempster Award—thank you to all of our students who participated this year.

About the Dempster Award:

The Dempster fund was started in 2012 by Stephen Blyth, a 1992 PhD alumnus, in honor of his advisor, Professor Arthur P. Dempster.  The purpose of the award is to “support and recognize promising graduate students within the Department of Statistics, in particular those who have made significant contributions to theoretical or foundational research in statistics.”

With the recent passing of Faculty Emeritus Arthur Dempster, this award carries additional meaning for the department and statistics community. Through this award, we continue to acknowledge Prof. Dempster’s impact on a future generation of statisticians.

We look forward to presenting Nathan and Xiaodong's award certificates at the May 28th Commencement Celebration and honoring their accomplishment.  Congratulations, Nathan and Xiaodong!