Statistics Ph.D. candidate Andriana Manousidaki is awarded NSF's prestigious research training IMPACTS fellowship

Andriana Manousidaki was awarded the National Science Foundation Research Training (NRT) IMPACTS Fellowship, to work under the supervision of Professors Haolei Weng (Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Probability) , Yuying Xie (Assistant Professor in the Departments of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering & Statistics and Probability) and Ning Jiang (Professor in the Department of Horticulture), on an interdisciplinary project for detecting LINEs in plant genome using novel manifold learning methods, which can efficiently explore intrinsic low-dimensional and non-linear structures in high-dimensional plant genomic data. LINEs constitute a type of mobile and repetitive sequences found in plant genomes. Accompanying statistical inferential theory will be further developed to assess the uncertainty in the detection results.

Ms. Manousidaki, one of ten trainees selected for this Fellowship at MSU, will also actively participate in interdisciplinary education and research activities supported by the NRT-IMPACTS training program. This NSF- and MSU-funded program's mission is to train doctoral students to apply advanced computational approaches for the better understanding of plants’ functions, production of sustainable food and the general advancement of plant sciences. NRT-IMPACTS started awarding fellowships at MSU in 2018. See https://impacts.natsci.msu.edu/ .