Statistics student Shuchi Goyal is a recipient of a CURO Research Assistantship for Spring 2018. This award includes a one-semester stipend of $1000 to conduct faculty-mentored research. As a CURO Research Assistant, Shuchi will continue her research on small area estimation, which she has been working on for the past six months under the guidance of Drs. Abhyuday Mandal and Gauri Datta. The purpose of this research is to extend the nested-error regression model, which incorporates auxiliary information, area-level effects, and unit-level random errors to estimate the response, to handle representative outliers. This will be accomplished by employing a two-component scale mixture of normal distributions and shrinkage coefficients. Shuchi is completing her final year at the University of Georgia with majors in statistics and economics and a minor in history. After graduating this May, she plans to join a PhD progam in statistics to continue her studies. She is particularly interested in the analysis of multidimensional data sets and identification of causational relationships, and she hopes to eventually apply statistics in policy or industrial research. She has previously worked as the editor-in-chief for the Georgia Political Review and as a Math Counts tutor, and sings soprano for the a cappella group UGA Kalakaar. Shuchi will present her research in the Spring 2018 CURO Symposium to be held on April 9-10 in the Classic Center. Type of News/Audience: Departmental
