Faculty at Home: Becky Tang

Please join Becky Tang, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, for a talk entitled “Statistical Modeling of Abundances within Ecological Communities.”

When people think of statistics, their minds probably turn toward histograms, sample means, and t-tests. In this talk, I will discuss another side of statistics: modeling. What is statistical modeling, why is it fun, and is it even useful? I will then share my work in developing a spatiotemporal model for the abundances of a community of fish species in the Gulf of Maine.

Becky Tang is an assistant professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Middlebury College. Her research focuses on developing Bayesian hierarchical models for ecological applications, with a particular focus on zero-inflated data. From a pedagogical perspective, she enjoys developing statistics courses that help students build intuition for and confidence in grappling with difficult quantitative concepts.

Register here