Professor Yingying Fan has been appointed Centennial Chair in Business Administration. A professor in the Data Sciences and Operations department, Fan was Dean’s Associate Professor in Business Administration from 2018 to 2021. Named chairs and professorships are among the highest honors bestowed by the university on the faculty. Fan is the inaugural recipient of the Centennial Chair, established in honor of USC Marshall’s centennial year.
“I was thrilled and humbled to receive such a great honor,” Fan said. “It has tremendous meaning to me, not just a recognition of my previous research, but also and more an encouragement for my future research. I am very grateful to my supportive colleagues and friends at Marshall, and feel extremely fortunate to be a member of the Marshall family.”
A renowned statistician, Fan has made seminal contributions to high-dimensional inferences, variable selection, classification and nonparametric methodologies, particularly in the field of financial econometrics. She has published 37 scholarly articles, 25 of which have been accepted or appeared in top-tier statistics journals. Her work has more than 3,400 Google scholar citations.
Fan was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2020 and as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 2019. She has received numerous awards, including the Guy Medal in Bronze from the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), which is considered the most prestigious award for a young statistician. She has also received the NSF CAREER award and the prestigious Noether Young Scholar Award, which is given annually to an accomplished young researcher in statistics. Fan also received a grant from NIH and several grants from NSF. She has been selected to give an Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Medallion Lecture in 2023.
A dedicated teacher, Fan strives to bring cutting-edge research to the classroom. Her graduate elective AI for Business was featured in Poets&Quants.
“Yingying is an exceptional scholar and a great department citizen,” said Greys Sošić, chair and professor of the Department of Data Sciences and Operations. “She is a wonderful role model for young female researchers in a field dominated by male scholars.”
Fan received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2007. Prior to coming to USC, she taught at Harvard University in the Department of Statistics. Fan joined the Marshall faculty in 2009 and was promoted to professor in 2019. She holds a joint appointment in the Economics department at USC.