Affiliation
Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University

Education
PhD, Statistics, University of Florence, Italy
BS, Mathematics, University of Florence, Italy

Marina Vannucci has been a professor of statistics at Rice University since 2007 and was department chair from 2014–2019. She also holds an adjunct appointment with the department of biostatistics at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Vannucci won the SIS (Italian Statistical Society) prize for “Best Doctoral Thesis in Statistics” for her PhD thesis on the application of wavelets in statistics. It came at a point in her life when she was trying to decide what to do next and gave her confidence in herself and her abilities as a researcher.

Later, during her postdoctoral experience in the UK, Vannucci was exposed to Bayesian methods for variable selection. That experience opened a productive line of research for her. She was able to independently extend methodologies to a variety of problems and modeling settings, including clustering and classification settings, models for non-Gaussian data, graphical models, and nonparametric Bayes modeling. Her methodological work has always been motivated by real problems that needed to be addressed with suitable statistical methods. Early applications were in chemometrics, engineering, and high-throughput genomics. In recent years, she has become more interested in neuroimaging and neuroscience problems and has built strong collaborations in these areas.

Vannucci considers advising an important part of the profession. She finds it fascinating when a diligent student grows into a fully independent researcher. She believes success in academia requires a combination of talent, skill, and determination and there is a strong individual component that can only come from within oneself. However, she also thinks it is important not to miss opportunities to acquire the necessary training and to work with people who can expose you to the process of doing research. In past years, Vannucci has particularly enjoyed leading small interdisciplinary teams of students and young researchers. She finds this a particularly effective form of training.

Service is another aspect of Vannucci’s professional career to which she has dedicated considerable effort, never shying away from time-consuming and, at times, challenging roles. This has included administrative service for her university, leadership roles for major professional societies such as the International Society for Bayesian Analysis and ASA, and international service for countries such as Italy and the United Kingdom. She is particularly proud of her editorial work as editor-in-chief of Bayesian Analysis and, currently, as editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Theory & Methods section.