Welcome new faculty members
August 15, 2018
The Statistics and Operations Research Department would like to welcome our newest faculty members, Associate Professor Mariana Olvera-Cravioto, and Teaching Assistant Professors Mario Giacomazzo and Jeffrey McLean!
Dr. Olvera-Cravioto
Dr. Olvera-Cravioto received her bachelor's degree is in Applied Mathematics from the "Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)". She obtained her Ph.D. at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2016 she worked in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. Prior to coming to UNC she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the IEOR Department at UC Berkeley. Mariana does research in Applied Probability, in particular, she works on problems involving heavy-tailed phenomena. Her current work is focused on the analysis of information ranking algorithms and their large-scale behavior, which is closely related to the study of the solutions to certain stochastic recursions constructed on weighted branching processes. She is also interested in the analysis of complex networks.
Dr. Giacomazzo
Dr. Giacomazzo was born and raised in Cleveland. From an early age, he discovered a passion for mathematics and education. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Math Education at Baldwin-Wallace University. He later went to Arizona State University where he received both Masters and Doctorate degrees in Statistics. The general topic of his dissertation involved Bayesian model selection techniques in linear and nonlinear time series.
Dr. Mclean
Dr. Mclean is coming from St Lawrence University in Upstate New York where he was a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow in Statistics. He received his PhD in Mathematics Education from Syracuse University, which focused on high school and college students’ learning of introductory statistics while engaged in a curriculum based in resampling methods. His current projects focus on student learning and curricular design while viewing mathematics and statistics through the lens of the models and modeling perspective, and the academic and social engagement of undergraduates in the mathematical sciences, with an emphasis on commuter students.