Bin Yu Named 2026 Myles Hollander Distinguished Lecturer

The Department of Statistics at Florida State University has announced that Bin Yu, the chancellor’s distinguished professor in the departments of statistics and electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, is the 2026 Myles Hollander Distinguished Lecturer. 

Yu will present “Veridical Data Science Towards Trustworthy AI” November 6 in the Chemical Sciences Building Auditorium on the FSU main campus in Tallahassee.

Yu earned a bachelor’s in mathematics from Peking University, as well as a master’s and PhD in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to becoming chancellor’s distinguished professor, she was a member of the technical staff at Lucent Bell Labs, a distinguished researcher in the deep learning group at Microsoft Research, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Miller Research Professor at UC Berkeley. She also serves as core faculty at the center for computational biology and senior adviser at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

Yu’s research focuses on interpretable machine learning, causal inference, and the development of stable, reproducible methods for scientific discovery. Throughout her career, she has made fundamental contributions to statistical theory, including pioneering work on VC theory for time series analysis, minimum description length and entropy estimation, sparse modeling, boosting, spectral clustering, and MCMC convergence analysis. Her interdisciplinary applied work spans neuroscience, genomics, remote sensing, and precision medicine.

Yu is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She has delivered several distinguished lectures, including the Breiman lectures, the COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lecture, the Tukey Memorial Lecture, and the Wald Memorial Lecture.

The Myles Hollander Distinguished Lectureship was established by the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor and statistics professor emeritus at Florida State University Myles Hollander in appreciation of the university, its statistics department, and the statistics profession. The annual lectureship recognizes an internationally renowned leader and pioneering researcher in statistics who has made a sustained impact on the field, and the lectures will feature topics spanning the breadth of statistics.