Nominated for the Missouri S&T Graduate Research Fellowship

I was recently informed that the Department of Mathematics and Statistics has nominated me for the university-wide Graduate Research Fellowship. This recognition means a great deal, and it belongs as much to the mentors, collaborators, and students who make our research group such a supportive place to learn as it does to me.

The nomination cites contributions to the department's dimension reduction seminar, where I have been organizing the reading list and coordinating speakers for the past two semesters, and my work supporting first-year graduate students through weekly office hours. Both roles have shaped how I think about my own research, because there is no better way to test whether you understand an idea than to explain it to a smart person who is encountering it for the first time.

I have been reflecting on how much of graduate school is invisible from the outside. The papers and talks are the visible artifacts, but the real work happens in the long stretches between them: reading carefully, failing at proofs, rewriting code that will never see a publication, and slowly building the taste that lets you tell a promising idea from a distracting one. This nomination is a small acknowledgment that those quieter hours matter too.

As part of the fellowship process I will be preparing a research statement that traces the arc from my early work on sufficient dimension reduction to the causal inference questions I hope to take on next. Writing that statement has already been useful, because it forced me to articulate why the questions I care about are worth caring about in the first place.

Thank you to everyone who has offered guidance, coffee breaks, and honest feedback along the way. I am looking forward to the interview stage and to reporting back with more news later this spring. Regardless of the outcome, the process of being nominated has been a gift.