Victoria Stodden, associate professor in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Associate professor in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in USC Viterbi School of Engineering Victoria Stodden has been honored with a series of top international awards from Germany and Australia, celebrating her body of research as a leading figure in understanding and assessing the reliability of data- and compute-enabled research results.
As a doctoral student, Stodden saw opportunities to advance the transparency of computational scientific research, and build communities through the sharing of tools, data, as workflows, as well as the scientific results themselves. Stodden has sought to increase the reproducibility of reported scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. Her “systems approach” to data science pipelines lead her to the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
Stodden is a 2024 recipient of Germany’s Humboldt Research Award, a prestigious prize recognizing the lifetime achievements of internationally renowned scholars. The Humboldt Award is presented in recognition of a researcher’s entire body of work, focusing on those whose discoveries, theories or insights have significantly impacted their discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.
“This is a very exciting step for me. The award recognizes more than a single result or paper, it is an appreciation of my entire research agenda,” said Stodden.
The award will enable Stodden to work as a visiting scholar at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), The University of Heidelberg, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), which has simultaneously honored her with an additional prize — the International Excellence Fellowship of KIT, awarded to an internationally renowned scientist in recognition of her or his scientific achievements and whose research has a lasting impact on their discipline also beyond their own field of work and addresses global challenges facing society in the 21st century as well as topics of relevance to the future.
“Victoria Stodden’s research and expertise are of utmost importance to HITS, where computational and data science take center stage,” said Prof. Dr. Tilmann Gneiting, Scientific Director at HITS and leader of the Computational Statistics group at HITS and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Stodden’s research agenda will also play a crucial role at the KIT Graduate School Computational and Data Science (KCDS) where Stodden will visit, supported by the KIT International Excellence Fellowship.
“We very much look forward to welcoming Victoria Stodden in Heidelberg and Karlsruhe from January 2025 onwards,” said Prof. Dr. Gneiting and co-host Prof. Dr. Melanie Schienle at KIT.
Stodden has also been honored by the University of Melbourne with the Professor Maurice H. Belz Visiting Scholar Award, recognizing global scholars working in statistics and related fields. The award is named for mathematical statistician Maurice Henry Belz (1897-1975), who was responsible for setting up the first autonomous Department of Statistics in Australia. This award will also support Stodden’s work as a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne during 2025.
Stodden plans to use these awards to improve processes for transparency and verifiability of computational data inference methods, in particular, it allows her to develop deep foundations for reliable scientific knowledge production in the face of plentiful computation through cloud technologies, data collection and availability on a scale not imagined even a decade ago, and powerful new inference technologies such as deep learning, AI, and recent advances in machine learning.
“I am honored and humbled to receive the Humboldt Prize, the International Excellence Fellowship of KIT, along with the Belz Award. I have always wanted to study deeply the foundations of the scientific method in the context of the coming future of radical transparency, ubiquitous compute and massive data. These awards give me an incredible opportunity to take this step,” said Stodden.
Published on December 3rd, 2024
Last updated on December 15th, 2024
