Vijay Nair Collegiate Professor and Chair, University of Michigan
Elizaveta Levina grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she attended what one might call a magnet STEM high school. Math came easily to her, so she studied it as an undergraduate without giving much thought to what she was going to do with it. “I did not really know what statistics was until I was assigned to teach an intro stats course while doing a master’s in math,” said Levina. “That was eye-opening: Being closer to real-world problems while still doing something math-related seemed very appealing.”
Levina applied to PhD programs in statistics, rather than math, and never looked back. She went to the University of California at Berkeley, learned to think like a statistician, and was fortunate to work with Peter Bickel. “Peter is, of course, a brilliant statistician,” she said. “And also one of the kindest, most generous people I have ever met. He has been a wonderful mentor to me.”
After earning her PhD, Levina joined the department of statistics at the University of Michigan and has been there ever since. “I have been fortunate in so many ways,” she said. “My husband and I have jobs in the same place; our three kids—born and raised here in lovely Ann Arbor—are all doing well. I have always been able to work on problems I find exciting, and I have had great collaborators and students. What else can one ask for?”
In general, Levina aims to contribute to methodology, theory, and applications, though not necessarily all at the same time. She recalls that on her first day at Berkeley, the graduate coordinator told the new PhD students to introduce themselves by saying whether they wanted to do probability, theoretical statistics, or applied statistics. She insisted on just “statistics,” and this has never changed.
The most rewarding part of Levina’s professional life is not papers (although she has written some on high-dimensional covariance estimation and statistical network analysis that have become well known), but relationships. She is particularly grateful for her mentoring relationships, both as a mentee and a mentor. In addition to Bickel, Vijay Nair has been an important mentor to her. He is the founding father of her department as it is today, and—now as chair of the same department—she relies on what she has learned from him every day.
As a mentor to her own PhD students and postdocs, junior faculty, and other junior researchers, she tries to help everyone discover their unique strengths and paths. She also tries to remind them to keep an eye on what is important in the long term, such as work-life balance. “It is great to see young people succeed and thrive; there is nothing more important than the next generation,” said Levina.
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