SDS Welcomes Rachel Wang, Visiting Harrington Faculty Fellow

The Department of Statistics and Data Sciences is pleased to welcome Rachel Wang, one of two 2021-2022 Harrington Faculty Fellows visiting the College of Natural Sciences. 

The Donald D. Harrington Fellows Program is one of the best endowed visiting scholar and graduate fellow programs in the nation. Sybil Harrington established the program as a tribute to her husband, Don Harrington, to support young faculty members and graduate students who have academic records of success and ingenuity.

Each year, fellows visit UT Austin to pursue their research and collaborate with colleagues. A Harrington Faculty Fellow is on leave from their home university and is appointed as a visiting member of the UT Austin faculty. The fellowship includes a competitive stipend, relocation expenses, and full medical benefits along with office space and administrative support provided by the host department, organized research unit (ORU), or institute. 

Rachel Wang, Department of Statistics and Data Sciences

Wang is currently a senior lecturer (equivalent to a tenured assistant professor) in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney. Her field of study broadly involves developing scalable statistical and computational tools with theoretical guarantees and applying them to big data-driven scientific problems.

Her research focuses on building methodological frameworks to extract information from large-scale genomics data, including single-cell data, and to gain new insight into cellular functions and states. She uses statistical network modeling and machine learning techniques to infer interactions between genes and regulatory elements and identify biomarkers, which can help shed light on the roles they play in determining cellular phenotypes and disease mechanisms.

See original article here:

https://cns.utexas.edu/news/natural-sciences-welcomes-two-visiting-harrington-faculty-fellows