Abel Rodriguez

I am a Professor of Statistics and Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs at the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I am also the Associate Director of the Center for Data, Discovery and Decisions (D3) at UC Santa Cruz. I develop statistical methods for complex problems in biology, social sciences and engineering. My research interests include Bayesian statistics and machine learning, specially nonparametric methods, spatial temporal models, network analysis and extreme value theory. I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. I obtained my undergraduate degrees at Universidad Catolica Andres Bello and Universidad Simon Bolivar, majoring in Law and Industrial Engineering, respectively. In 2000 I completed my M.S. in Statistics at Universidad Simon Bolivar and, after working for four years, I moved to the US to pursue a Ph.D. in Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University. At Duke I also completed an M.A. in Economics and a certificate in Computational Biology. Since 2007 I have been at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (and, since July 1, 2018, at the Department of Statistics) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, first as an Assistant Professor (between 2007 and 2011), then as an Associate Professor (between 2011 and 2015), and now as a Full Professor. During the acaemic year 2012-2013 I received a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. I am currently an Associate Editor for the Annals of Applied Statistics and for Bayesian Analysis. I am also a member of the Board of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and served in various capacities for the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.