A Letter from the Department Chair
Dear colleagues, students and friends,
Welcome back! The spring and summer semesters have been filled with exciting news and remarkable achievements from both our faculty and students.
We are pleased to welcome two new faculty members, Muge Yayla-Kullu and Saidat Sanni, to our department. We also bid farewell to Max Kilger who retired from UTSA in May and Kim Kyle who has embarked on a new journey in the Department of Management after nearly 20 years of dedicated service.
I am extremely proud of my colleagues for their accomplishments. Our faculty’s hard work was recognized with four out of seven college awards presented to Keying Ye, Minghe Sun, Yeonjoo Park, and Maho Sonmez. Additionally, Minghe Sun received one of the university's most prestigious awards for his research achievements. David Han was appointed the Romo Endowed Professor by the Honor’s College in recognition of his outstanding teaching, and Jerome Keating was honored for his remarkable 50 years of service at UTSA. Many colleagues have also published research in elite journals and secured various grants from the university.
Our students have had significant successes as well. Isil Koyuncu led a student team to victory in the Data Presentation category at the SAS Curiosity Cup. Additionally, our student team participated in the Supply Chain Case Competition and earned second place! The ASA Student Club has been highly active, organizing workshops and helping to host the DataFest competition.
I’m pleased to report that all our MS-SDS students who took the comprehensive exam passed successfully. Haifa Ismail-Aldayeh successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation while student ambassadors Negash and Reisa Widjaja passed their Ph.D. proposal defenses. We also welcomed three new doctoral students to the program.
As we have started another academic year, I look forward to the continued successes of everyone!
Wenbo Wu, Ph.D.
Department Chair
Management Science and Statistics
Faculty News
Professor Minghe Sun Honored with Research Achievement Award
Minghe Sun, professor of Management Science and Statistics, was awarded the Research Achievement Award for his impactful and high-quality research in the fields of management science and operations research. With a career spanning over three decades, Sun has distinguished himself through his innovative applications of optimization techniques for real-world problems, including recent advancements in machine learning and supply chain management.
Faculty Achievements
Jerome Keating, Peter T. Flawn professor of management science and statistics, and distinguished teaching professor, was recognized during the university award ceremony for this remarkable 50 years of service.
David Han has been appointed to be the Romo Endowed Professor for the next two academic years to recognize his outstanding teaching in the Honors College.
- Minghe Sun has received the 1969 Commemorative Faculty Award for Overall Faculty Excellence
- Keying Ye has received the E. Lou Curry Teaching Excellence Award
- Yeonjoo Park has received the 1969 Commemorative Award for Teaching Excellence
- Maho Sonmez has received the Patrick J. Clynes Endowed Service Award
Isil Koyuncu and Yuexia Zhang have been selected to participate in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD) Faculty Success Program.
Grants
- FY '25 Internal Research Award (INTRA) Awardees
- Isil Koyuncu and Yuexia Zhang, “Casual Inference for Post-Transport Patient Acuity Using the National Emergency Medical Services Dataset”
- Yeonjoo Park, “Deep Learning Approaches to Functional Data Analysis: Applications from Data Reconstruction to Predictive Modeling”
- Min Wang, “A Novel Bayesian Kriging Approach for Quality Design: To Test or Not to Test?”
- Collaborative Seed Funding Grant Awardees, sponsored by the School of Data Science (SDS) and Open Cloud Institute (OCI)
- Ke Yang, Anthony Rios and Yuexia Zhang, “Reducing Hallucination of LLMs for Causality-integrated Personal Medical History Question Answering”
- Mitra Bokaei Hosseini, Yufang Jin, Wenbo Wu and Keying Ye, “A User-Centric Predictive Model of Perceived Risk in Generative AI”
Publications
- Amir Karimi’s paper “Procurement for Empowerment: The Impact of Female Decision-Makers in Reproductive Health Supply Chains” was accepted for publication at Production and Operations Management, which is an elite (UTD24) journal in our college
- Amir Karimi’s paper “Toward Advancing Women's Health in Least Developed Countries: Evaluating Contraceptive Distribution Models in Senegal” was accepted for publication at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (MSOM) and Production and Operations Management (POM), which is an elite (UTD24) journal in our college. His paper won the College of Healthcare Operations Management Best Paper Award at the POMS conference this year.
- Minge Sun’s paper “Deep Stacking Kernel Machines for the Data-driven Multi-item One-warehouse Multi-retailer Problems with Backlog and Lost Sales” was accepted by INFORMS Journal on Computing which is a UTD24 journal.
- Tianhai Zu’s paper “Local Bootstrap for Network Data” was accepted for publication at Biometrika, which is an elite journal in our college
Department Welcomes Two New Full-time Faculty Members
Müge Yayla-Küllü, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Management Science and Statistics
Müge Yayla-Küllü is an award-winning researcher with numerous publications in top-tier journals. Her research is characterized by a data-driven approach to resource critical missions, ensuring that strategic decisions are informed by comprehensive mathematical analysis, thereby enhancing the impact and reach of our initiatives around the globe.
Saidat Abidemi Sanni, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Management Science and Statistics
Saidat Abidemi Sanni received a Ph.D. in Business Analytics at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, with a specialization in ultrahigh-dimensional data and machine learning algorithms. Her research is multidisciplinary and bridges business analytics, finance, and information systems, with application areas including asset pricing, healthcare, and digital platforms.
New Senior Administrative Associate
Denice Kindred joins the department as the new Senior Administrative Associate.
“I’ve been working here since 2006 and have enjoyed being part of the UTSA team for many years. I’m a proud parent of two adult sons, and I also have a Betta fish and a Shar Pei mix dog. In my free time, I love hiking at scenic places, reading/listening to audiobooks, learning about different cultures, online shopping, and traveling to new places.”
Student Spotlights
Jerry and Mary Keating Endowed Scholarship in Statistics
Efrain Gaza, who double majors in actuarial science and business analytics and is also a business honor student, has received the Jerry and Mary Keating Endowed Scholarship. Efrain was inducted to the prestigious Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society last spring semester and is currently serving as a tutor in our TLC tutoring program.
Student Research Presentation
Undergraduate student Marco Teniente presented his research, advised by Anuradha Roy, titled “Climate Change: An Interval-Valued Data Exploration in U.S. Temperatures,” at the 2024 International Conference of Advanced Research in Applied Science, Engineering, and Technology in Houston, Texas, on March 28, 2024. After delivering an excellent presentation, Marco received numerous compliments for his work. We are thrilled to see him receive such positive feedback! Marco graduated at the end of Spring 2024 and, with his advisor’s encouragement, is now considering pursuing a Ph.D. We look forward to following his academic journey!
Applying Classroom Knowledge as an Actuarial Analyst Intern
Undergraduate student Adrian Ahumada interned at UnitedHealth Group as an E&I Actuarial Analyst Intern in the Pricing Department, where he frequently applied the technical and statistical concepts learned during his studies.
The assumptions Adrian made were heavily based on Central Limit Theorem, Law of Large Numbers, Univariate/Multivariate Probability Distributions, and Time Value of Money. Throughout the internship, Adrian worked on various projects, including forecasting premiums and rates. One of the classes that helped him the most was Dengdeng Yu’s Probability and Statistics course.
Student Achievements
- Hector Calderon, an operations and supply chain management major and Summer 2023 UTIMCO Scholar, has been selected to serve on the President’s Council. Hector is a first-generation student and currently a junior.
- A team of OSCM majors—Savannah G., Taylor A., Chris W. and Patrick M., supervised by Vern—won second place at the HBCU & HSI International Supply Chain Case Competition, hosted by Arizona State University.
- Two student teams from the Alvarez College of Business honors program, supervised by Mark Leung, were recognized at this year’s UTSA Undergraduate Research Symposium. One team earned second place in the presentation category, while the other received an honorable mention in the poster category. Team members included students majoring in statistics and data science, actuarial science, business analytics, and operations and supply chain management.
- A team of four UTSA students—Nupoor Karnik, Gagana Kumar, Niharika Bandlamudi and Ki Jeong, supervised by Isil Koyuncu, won first place in the Data Presentation category at the SAS Curiosity Cup, a prestigious global data science and analytics competition featuring 107 teams from around the world.
ASA Student Club Activities
- The club played a key role in organizing UTSA's first-ever virtual DataFest competition, with several members achieving top placements.
- Additionally, the club hosted two successful workshops:
- An Overview to Machine Learning
- Basic R Programming
- Below is a list of newly elected officers
- Paulina Betancourt, Social Media Officer
- Efrain Garza, Treasurer
- Mirsab Zar, Graduate Affairs
- Jackson Garriot, Junior Officer
- La Mia Pruitt, President
- Adrian Ahumada, Vice President
- Nadia Trevino, Secretary
- Nathan Corbin, Public Relations
Comprehensive Exams Complete!
A total of 16 M.S. in Statistics and Data Science students successfully completed their two-day comprehensive exams this summer. Here's a look at the celebration after the second day's exam for some of those students—time to relax and enjoy!
Alumni Corner
Joshua Emilio Lazaro, one of our outstanding alumni, is thriving in the Biomedical Data Science Ph.D. program at Stanford! He has been working with the California Department of Public Health, using West Nile Virus case data, satellite data and census data to forecast outbreaks with time series and machine learning techniques. Joshua just completed his first year, maintaining an impressive 4.0 GPA. He has taken exciting courses including Data Science for Electronic Health Records and Applications of Data Science in Medicine while tackling challenging subjects like Continuous Mathematical Methods and Analysis of Algorithms. Joshua credits his success to the strong foundation in statistics gained at UTSA and is currently preparing an application for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Doctoral Student Achievements
Ph.D. Defense – Spring 2024
Candidate: Haifa Ismail-Aldayeh
Date: April 29, 2024
Dissertation Title: Adaptive design and inference for step-stress accelerated life tests with lifetimes from exponential and log-location-scale families of distributions
Supervising Advisor: David Han, Ph.D.
Candidate: Ambassador Negash
Date: April 17, 2024
Dissertation Title: Event detection in the absence of ground truth with empirical Bayes methods
Supervising advisors: Keying Ye, Ph.D. and Yeonjoo Park, Ph.D.
Ph.D. Defense – Summer 2024
Candidate: Reisa Widjaja
Date: August 23, 2024
Dissertation Title: Novel methodologies for spatial-temporal dependent data
Supervising Advisors: Wenbo Wu, Ph.D. and Keying Ye, Ph.D.
MSS Fall Research Seminars
- Yue Liao, Ph.D. - Department of Kinesiology, The University of Texas at Arlington, "Harnessing Data from Wearable Sensors to Inform Behavioral Intervention and Public Health Research," April 19, 2024
- Linbo Wang, Ph.D. - Department of Statistical Sciences and Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Toronto, "Sparse Causal Learning," April 5, 2024
Aniruddha Rajendra Rao, Ph.D. - Hitachi America, Ltd., "Functional Neural Networks - Deep Learning for Functional Data," March 22, 2024 - Zhibin (Ben) Yang, Ph.D. - Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, "Harnessing Complementary Strengths with a Joint Venture Under Competition and Brand Spillover," March 8, 2024
- Mariel Lavieri, Ph.D. - University of Michigan, "Managing Patients with Chronic Conditions," March 1, 2024
- Vishal Ahuja, Ph.D. - Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University, "When Does Collocation of Physical and Mental Health Services Matter?," Feb. 16, 2024
- Craig Froehle, Ph.D. - UC Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, "Adding Fairness to Algorithms: Exploration of Theory and a Case Study from Healthcare," Feb. 2, 2024
- Jun Li, Ph.D. - Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, "Competitive Pricing at Scale: Theory and Practices," Nov. 10, 2023
- Jian Cao, Ph.D. - The University of Houston, “Linear-Cost Vecchia Approximation of Multivariate Normal Probabilities," Oct. 20, 2023
- Chul Moon, Ph.D. - Southern Methodist University, “Using Persistent Homology Topological Features to Characterize Medical Images: Case Studies on Lung and Brain Cancers,” Sept. 22, 2023
Department Events and Activities
2024 ASA DataFest at UTSA
The department hosted the virtual ASA DataFest from April 19-21, 2024 for the San Antonio area. While local undergraduate students from various universities participated in this event, two teams from UTSA received recognition in the following categories:
- Best in Show: Ryan Berberek, Sarah Dominguez, Tia Miller and Aidan Mills
- Best Visualization: Lauren Hochman, Paulina Betancourt and Efrain Garza
UTSA Faculty and Students Judge the ARSEF 2024
The annual Alamo Regional Science and Engineering Fair (ARSEF) is open to science projects from students in grades 6–12 in the Alamo Region of Texas, serving as a platform for aspiring scientists to showcase their research and earn awards.
The American Statistical Association (ASA) supports this event by recognizing science projects that apply statistical methodology in their research, promoting the importance of statistics in high schools. At the 2024 ARSEF, held at St. Mary’s University in February 2024, MSS faculty Keying Ye and Yeonjoo Park, along with M.S. SDS student Soun-Ja Walters, volunteered as special judges for the ASA.
Recruiting at St. Mary's University
To recruit graduate students from the local community, Jerome Keating and Keying Ye visited St. Mary’s University to share information about the M.S. in Statistics and Data Science and the Ph.D. in Applied Statistics programs. In the photo on the left, Keating is presenting an overview of the graduate programs to a math class.
Welcoming New Ph.D. Students in Applied Statistics
On Aug. 22, the department faculty and current Ph.D. students welcomed three new Ph.D. students: Angelica Garcia, Fernando Montes and Ying Teng. It was a valuable opportunity to get to know one another, discuss what to expect in Ph.D. life, and share stories of summer fun among colleagues.
New Adventures Ahead for Kim Kyle
After nearly two decades of dedicated service since joining in Oct. 10, 2005, Kim Kyle, a senior administrative associate, has been an invaluable part of our department. Her warm presence and helpful nature have supported us in every aspect. We are immensely grateful for all she has done to keep things running smoothly and wish her all the best as she embarks on her next adventure in the Department of Management!
Degree Programs
Undergraduate Programs
- B.B.A. in Actuarial Science (Coordinator: Dr. Jerome Keating)
- B.B.A. in Business Analytics (Coordinator: Dr. Arka Roy)
- B.B.A. in Operations and Supply Chain Management (Coordinator: Dr. Maho Sonmez)
- B.S. in Statistics and Data Science (Coordinator: Dr. Jerome Keating)
Undergraduate certificates are also available in business analytics and operations and supply chain management.
Actuarial science uses mathematical and statistical models to solve problems in insurance and finance, including mathematics, statistics, economics and finance as part of the program. An actuary is an expert in risk management and their skills are in high demand in the industry.
Business analytics students learn to develop and apply analytical models by acquiring quantitative and computer skills to solve problems in business environments. This degree focuses on practical applications and appropriate programming with a view on how a manager can effectively apply quantitative business models to improve decision-making.
Operations and supply chain management students learn how to deal with ensuring the uninterrupted flow of goods and services from a business to its customers. Students take a multidisciplinary approach to designing systems, making decisions and solving complex problems for organizations and their supply chains. Students practice analytical, communication and leadership skills and acquire essential computer skills.
A degree in statistics trains students to collect, analyze and interpret numerical information to answer questions in modern-day life. It can lead to careers in various areas such as clinical research, quality control, corporate planning and financial analysis.
Graduate Programs
- M.S. in Statistics and Data Science (Coordinator: Dr. Keying Ye)
- M.S. in Artificial Intelligence (Analytic Track Coordinator: Dr. Keying Ye)
- Ph.D. in Applied Statistics (Coordinator: Dr. Min Wang)
A graduate certificate in operations and supply chain management is also available.
