A professor at the University of Chicago was announced Wednesday as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a “genius grant,” for her work in theoretical statistics. Her work has been used to improve the quality of medical CT scans and to find the most useful types of information in large datasets.
Rina Foygel Barber, who was born in Odesa, Ukraine, is one of 20 to receive the no-strings-attached $800,000 stipend that “is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
“The research I do is mostly theoretical. What I’m interested in is how to understand what it is that algorithms are doing and what it is that models are doing when we apply them to complex data and high-dimensional data,” she said in a video on the MacArthur Foundation’s website.
Barber, 40, who declined requests for interviews, is receiving the grant for her work as a statistician in trying to reduce false positive results and improve confidence, or the amount of trust, in certain data models.
Barber studies the theoretical side of statistics and designs new methods for working with datasets. Her research focuses on reducing false discovery rates and working with machine-learning models.
In other words, a lot of her work focuses on improving pre-existing theory.
“And in particular, the questions I look at are things like, what type of assumptions are we making and what can go wrong?” she said.
Her work improves the quality of statistical analysis while uncovering the limitations of statistical methodologies. Barber and Emmanuel Candès created the knockoff filter framework, which essentially shows the likelihood of a false positive and is now widely used by researchers in the field.
“What statistics can offer is a way to quantify these issues and essentially to give us a way to study what it is that these algorithms are actually doing and what good or bad consequences that might have,” she said.
Barber’s work is applicable to scientific research in multiple fields, including health care, climate science and astronomical imaging. Barber is mostly on the theory side of statistics while others may implement her work in practice.
Her previous work has been used in medical imaging. When CT scans are taken, there can be missing data and Barber’s work has helped fill in that missing data.
Barber received a master’s of science in mathematics in 2009 and a doctorate in 2012 from the University of Chicago, where she is a Louis Block professor in the Department of Statistics.
Barber has published work in journals such as Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association and Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.
Past MacArthur Fellows include Susan Sontag, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Colson Whitehead.
Selection for the MacArthur Fellowship is a multistep process with candidates chosen from among about 2,000 nominations, according to the MacArthur Foundation’s website.
The other 2023 MacArthur Fellows:
- E. Tendayi Achiume, Los Angeles; legal scholar
- Andrea Armstrong, New Orleans; incarceration law scholar
- Ian Bassin, Washington, D.C.; lawyer and democracy advocate
- Courtney Bryan, New Orleans; composer and pianist
- Jason D. Buenrostro, Cambridge, Massachusetts; cellular and molecular biologist
- María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nashville, Tennessee; multidisciplinary artist
- Raven Chacon, Red Hook, New York; composer and artist
- Diana Greene Foster, San Francisco; demographer and reproductive health researcher
- Lucy Hutyra, Boston; environmental ecologist
- Carolyn Lazard, Philadelphia; artist
- Ada Limón, Lexington, Kentucky; poet
- Lester Mackey, Cambridge, Massachusetts; computer scientist and statistician
- Patrick Makuakāne, San Francisco; Kumu Hula and cultural preservationist
- Linsey Marr, Blacksburg, Virginia; environmental engineer
- Manuel Muñoz, Tucson, Arizona; fiction writer
- Imani Perry, Cambridge, Massachusetts; interdisciplinary scholar and writer
- Dyani White Hawk, Shakopee, Minnesota; multidisciplinary artist
- A. Park Williams, Los Angeles; hydroclimatologist
- Amber Wutich, Tempe, Arizona; anthropologist
