Professor Veronika Rockova Wins Top Statistics Honor

Veronika Rockova, professor of econometrics and statistics and the James S. Kemper Foundation Faculty Fellow, has won the 2024 COPSS Presidents’ Award for her outstanding contributions to the statistics field.

Since 1976, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies has presented the prestigious honor annually to a young member of the statistical community, along with a plaque and a cash award.

COPSS, which awards the distinction to the best statistician 40 or younger, chose Rockova for her “pathbreaking contributions to theory and methodology at the intersection of Bayesian and frequentist statistics,” as well as for her exemplary service to the field and “her generous mentorship of students and postdoctoral researchers.”

“The award is a culmination of all my experiences, my perseverance, and my love for statistics,” says Rockova. “This recognition means a lot to me partly because I am the first Czech to receive it. It’s gratifying to sprinkle confetti on my home country, women in statistics, Bayesian statistics, and all the institutions that have been my academic sanctuaries over the years. Chicago Booth in particular has allowed me to grow as an investigator and to immerse myself in research. I feel tremendous gratitude.”

Rockova joined the Booth faculty in 2016. She teaches the course Big Data, instructing students on how to interpret complicated data and become adept at building powerful models for prediction and classification. Her research interests combine statistics and machine learning, with a focus on creating innovative decision-centric tools to mine insights from extensive datasets. Her applied interests include healthcare analytics and computational medicine.

“Everyone is trying to use machine-learning methods to analyze big data nowadays, and Veronika’s research is at the cutting edge of this fast-growing area,” says Lubos Pastor, the Charles P. McQuaid Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and a Robert King Steel Faculty Fellow.

Sendhil Mullainathan, the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science, agrees, adding that the award is well deserved. “Veronika is amazing in that she combines the rigor of theoretical statistics with the practicality of meaningful applications. Her work has included topics from cancer genomics to hospital performance evaluation, showcasing the breadth of her insight and curiosity.”

Rockova previously won a COPSS Emerging Leader Award in 2023 and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020. She serves as an associate editor for the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Statistical Methodology).

An excerpt of this story appeared in the Fall 2024 print issue of Chicago Booth Magazine under “Faculty Honors.”