The Statistics Department congratulates undergraduate Dinan Hamdi Elsyad (a junior statistics concentrator) on receiving the best video presentation at the 2023 Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference for her summer research work with Niels Korsgaard (Harvard), Kate Hu (Harvard), Grayson White (Michigan State), Josh Yamamoto, and George Gaines (research scientist for the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program), which was supervised by Senior Lecturer in Statistics Dr. Kelly McConville.
The Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference (eUSR) is a free, online conference designed for undergraduates in data science and statistics to present their work and learn about careers and graduate opportunities in statistics and data science. Elsyad received the award for her video titled, "Small Area Estimation," which describes her project to evaluate current estimators being used to estimate tree biomass across the US and proposes a new Zero Inflation Estimator. Elsyad and collaborators found that the new Zero Inflation Estimator leverages more data and fits the data better than some of the other models used for small area estimation.