Statistics Welcomes New Professor Eric Chi

This fall, the School of Statistics is pleased to welcome new associate professor Eric Chi. Dr. Chi answered a few questions about himself.

What brought you to the University?

I'm looking forward to joining the School of Statistics and working with my colleagues there. I know and work with some exceptional graduates of their PhD program. It has a great tradition and exciting future.

What is your area of study, and how did you become interested in it?

I received a PhD in statistics from Rice University in 2011. After my PhD, I completed postdoctoral positions in the Human Genetics department at UCLA and the Digital Signal Processing group at Rice. Before joining UMN in 2025, I was an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University.

My research interests are in statistical learning and numerical optimization, and their applications in engineering and sciences.

What projects are you working on right now?

My research centers around developing provably fast and reliable computational algorithms for statistics and machine learning. These days, I'm working on projects that use optimization techniques to improve sampling and sampling techniques to improve optimization.

This story was edited by Rory Schaefer, an undergraduate student in CLA.