Three of Texas A&M University’s leading statistics professors—Dr. Anirban Bhattacharya, Dr. Huiyan Sang and Dr. Xianyang Zhang—have been awarded prestigious fellowships by the university’s College of Arts and Sciences. These fellowships are designed to recognize early- and mid-career faculty who exhibit excellence in both teaching and scholarship and show great promise for their future career.
Faculty fellowships, established with a donor-created endowment through the Texas A&M Foundation, serve as a reward for top faculty members and help the university retain top talent. Each fellowship provides funds that the recipient can use to support their teaching, research and students.
“These fellowships demonstrate how philanthropy directly shapes the future of our department,” said Dr. Brani Vidakovic, holder of the H.O. Hartley Chair in Statistics and head of the Department of Statistics. “By supporting faculty excellence, the Patricia and William B. Smith Fellowship and the Carroll and Ory Family Fellowships sustain the vibrant research environment that defines our community and propels our discipline forward.”
Power-ful Statistics: Dr. Anirban Bhattacharya
Bhattacharya is the recipient of the Patricia R. Smith and Dr. William B. Smith Faculty Fellowship for Statistics. This endowment was established in 2024 by Dr. Ersen Arseven ’74, a biostatistician, to honor Smith, one of the department’s former students and faculty members, and Smith’s wife, Patricia, whom Arseven described as his “protecting angel and guardian.”
Now Bhattacharya is making his own mark by following his passion for statistics, which was sparked by the sport of cricket. “I instinctively used to notice various patterns, such as how individual and team scores depend on weather conditions, the time of the game and the quality of the opposition bowling attack,” Bhattacharya said. “I then tried—often unsuccessfully—to make predictions about various aspects of the game.”
Intrigued, Bhattacharya focused his undergraduate studies at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata on statistics and probability. His interest in the subject did not stop there; he earned his doctorate and served as a postdoctoral associate at Duke University before coming to Texas A&M in 2013.
Bhattacharya has thrived in Aggieland, being promoted to professor in 2020 and becoming a highly regarded researcher. “My research aims to answer foundational questions related to Bayesian statistics, such as quantifying prior knowledge when the number of parameters is large, selecting between competing statistical models, and designing efficient algorithms to carry out the Bayesian updating,” he said, adding that his work has been applied in astrophysics, nuclear physics, power-system networks and material design. “I enjoy collaborating with domain scientists, which often leads to the development of new statistical methodology.”
Bhattacharya is also committed to fostering students’ appreciation for the discipline and supporting junior faculty through formal mentoring and offering insights from his own professional experiences. He teaches introductory and advanced courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and has supervised 20 doctoral students. “I deeply enjoy teaching, and getting ideas across to students gives me immense joy,” he said. “My advising philosophy is to be adaptive; each student has their own strengths, and I believe in maximizing their strengths while offering honest feedback on avenues for improvement.”
Bhattacharya will use the fellowship’s funds to develop specialized graduate topic courses, enhance existing courses, and support graduate students’ travel and networking opportunities. “This fellowship strongly motivates me to mentor graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and help them grow in their respective career paths, and to continue working on high-quality research collaborations with colleagues and students here at Texas A&M and beyond,” he said. “I hope to be able to play a significant role in fulfilling the university’s academic mission by leading impactful, ethical, transparent research with reproducible results and publishing in top-level journals.”
Precise Patterns: Dr. Huiyan Sang
Sang’s interest in statistics began while studying mathematical sciences at Peking University. “As an undergraduate, I was drawn to mathematics for its precision and logic, but I also wanted to see how theory could be applied to real-world problems,” she said.
Her doctoral studies at Duke University helped her understand the power of statistical models to describe environmental and physical processes that are spatial, which resulted in her interdisciplinary research approach.
Since joining Texas A&M in 2008, Sang’s innovative research has made her a leader in Bayesian statistics and spatial statistics, resulting in her recognition as an American Statistical Association Fellow in 2024. She has developed statistical methods for high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, and complex spatial and network data analysis, with applications in urban planning and traffic statistics, environmental health studies, oceanography, social sciences, economics and business, engineering, and biomedical studies.
Now serving as director of the department’s undergraduate program, Sang relishes teaching undergraduate and graduate students. “I design projects and case studies that apply statistical knowledge and concepts to various real-world scenarios in environmental science, engineering, climate change, public health and biomedical studies,” she said. “I tailor my courses and data examples to align with the diverse academic backgrounds and interests of the students in each class.”
Sang also enjoys mentoring students and junior faculty. “I work closely with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to help them build both technical expertise and professional confidence. My doctoral students have gone on to secure positions in academia, industry and leading research institutions,” she said. “For junior faculty and early-career researchers, I aim to provide guidance on balancing research, teaching and service, and to help them identify opportunities for impactful collaborations.”
She believes receiving this fellowship serves as a significant bellwether for her career. “It feels especially special that it was established by Dr. Raymond Carroll and Dr. Marcia Ory, two outstanding researchers and mentors whose work and guidance have profoundly influenced my professional growth over the years,” said Sang, who will use the funds to support ongoing and emerging research directions and cover travel costs for herself and her students to attend conferences. “Their examples have inspired me to expand and deepen my own research and mentoring efforts. I believe receiving this fellowship will further motivate me to continue advancing the field and supporting the next generation of scholars.”
A Gut Statistical Reaction: Dr. Xianyang Zhang
Dr. Xianyang Zhang holds the Regina and Norman Carroll Faculty Fellowship in Statistics. This fellowship, which was also created by Carroll and Ory in 2024 as part of the gift marking their mutual 75th birthday celebrations, honors Carroll’s parents: Norman, who was a U.S. Air Force colonel, and Regina, who was a housewife.
Zhang’s interest in statistics began as an undergraduate at the University of Science and Technology of China. “I was initially admitted into their math program, and we were allowed to select our major later,” he said. “In my third year, I chose statistics because I was fascinated by the power of using mathematical principles to find hidden patterns in data and make sense of uncertainty.”
After completing his doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Zhang joined Texas A&M in 2015, where he began developing statistical tools that can analyze complex data, such as genomics and microbiomes. “This area is about finding a ‘needle in a haystack.’ When researchers study the human microbiome, they compare thousands of bacterial types between healthy people and those with a disease,” he said. “It’s very easy to find false positives—links that look real but are just due to chance. My work builds robust statistical models that clean up this data, correctly manage its unique properties and dramatically reduce these false positives. This allows scientists to confidently pinpoint which specific microbes are truly associated with a disease, a key step toward developing new treatments.”
Like his colleagues, Zhang enjoys working with students. He strives to help undergraduates build a strong intuitive understanding of how data can be used to answer real-world questions, while his graduate courses encourage students to develop a rigorous theoretical understanding connected to cutting-edge research problems.
He also finds mentoring rewarding, guiding doctoral students toward becoming independent researchers and serving as a faculty mentor and member of the department’s Promotion and Tenure Committee.
Zhang is especially honored to receive the Carroll Fellowship. “Professionally, it is a wonderful validation of the research my students, collaborators and I have been doing. It provides recognition from the College of Arts and Sciences not just for my past work, but also for the future potential of my research agenda,” he said, adding that the funds will be used to support his graduate students. “Moreover, this fellowship is particularly meaningful to me on a personal level since it was established in honor of my colleague’s parents. Knowing that personal connection and seeing how pleased his family is makes it so much more than just a professional honor. It deepens my gratitude for his family’s legacy and their support of our department.”
These three fellowships set the stage for the Department of Statistics to expand and strengthen its faculty talent pool. It is through this type of investment that Texas A&M, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Statistics can remain an academic powerhouse. Noting that these fellowships are critical to helping nurture, grow and retain outstanding young faculty in a competitive world, Vidakovic said, “Recognizing the exceptional research and teaching of Drs. Bhattacharya, Sang and Zhang, these awards strengthen our national visibility and ensure continued excellence in statistical science at Texas A&M.”