ICS News Archive

Mine Dogucu Receives Young Investigator Award

On Aug. 9, 2021, at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) conference, Assistant Professor of Teaching Mine Dogucu received the Young Investigator Award. Given annually by the American Statistical Association (ASA) Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences (TSHS) section, the award recognizes a promising educator in statistics. “I am thankful for the support I receive from the statistics education community in Teaching Statistics and Health Sciences section and the broader American Statistical Association,” says Dogucu, whose work in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) focuses on curriculum development and modernization.

One consideration for the award recipient is a published paper on “the use of effective methods in statistics education or innovative statistics education research in the health sciences.” Dogucu’s nomination included a paper she co-authored in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, “Web Scraping in the Statistics and Data Science Curriculum: Challenges and Opportunities.” Dogucu recognizes that the web is a main source of data for many student projects and that getting web data into a structured format manually can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. So, the paper introduces web scraping and presents activities for examining its use at various levels of statistics and data science curricula while considering the ethical implications.

Dogucu also helps run a California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) program in Data Science for Health Sciences for high school students. The curriculum helps students answer questions such as how clinical data collected in an ambulance might help determine the best course of action before a patient suspected of suffering an acute stroke arrives at the hospital. Other parts of the curriculum address how data science can be applied to neuroscience, public health, nursing and pharmacology.

This Young Investigator Award spotlights Dogucu’s innovative work in statistics education and her use of health sciences to engage next-generation data scientists. For UCI students interested in taking a course from this award-winning professor, Dogucu will be teaching Introduction to Data Science (no prerequisites) in fall 2021 and Introduction to Bayesian Data Analysis in winter 2022.

— Shani Murray