Two Chosen for 2021 Natrella Scholarship Awards

Will Guthrie, Natrella Scholarship Selection Committee Chair

photo of Minhee Kim

Minhee Kim

Photo of Siddhesh Kulkarni

Siddhesh Kulkarni

The Quality and Productivity Section awarded two Mary G. and Joseph Natrella Scholarships at the 2021 Quality and Productivity Research Conference, held July 26-29 online and in Tallahassee, Florida. The recipients for 2021 are Minhee Kim, a PhD candidate in the department of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Siddhesh Kulkarni, a PhD candidate in the department of bioinformatics and biostatistics at the University of Louisville.

Kim was recommended for the award by Kaibo Liu, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Po-Ling Loh, a professor at Cambridge University. Her presentation at the conference was titled “Covariate Dependent Sparse Functional Data Analysis.”

Kulkarni was recommended for the award by Jeremy Gaskins and Subhadip Pal, professors at the University of Louisville. The title of his presentation was “A Bayesian Approach for Joint Estimation for Sparse Canonical Correlation and Graphical Models.”

The winners were chosen for their outstanding teaching, community service, mentoring, leadership, scholarship, and commitment to the pursuit of quality improvement using statistical methods.

The scholarships are funded by the ASA Natrella Scholarship Fund and Quality and Productivity Research Conference. Each scholarship recipient gave a research presentation at the conference and received a $3,500 scholarship, plus $500 for travel expenses and complimentary registration for the conference and pre-conference short course.

Members of the scholarship selection committee include Scott Kowalski (Minitab), Christina Mastrangelo (University of Washington), Sharad Prabhu (SAS), and Jolene Splett (NIST).