Lihua Lei:

I would like to thank the KAG travel grant for supporting my attendance at the 2019 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) at Denver from July 27 to August 1. It involves more than 6,500 attendees from 52 countries with 600+ sessions. It is also one of the broadest, with topics ranging from statistical applications to methodology and theory to the expanding boundaries of statistics, such as analytics and data science. The opportunity to meet so many statisticians and to learn the state-of-the-arts in a variety of areas helps me establish connection in academia and expand my knowledge in different fields. The Berkeley reception was particularly impressive!

I gave an invited talk in the session honoring Lawrence D. Brown’s contributions. The talk was about statistical inference for completely randomized experiments in presence of many covariates under the Neyman-Rubin causal model, a joint work with Professor Peng Ding. It was a great chance for me to meet with brilliant scholars from Brown's group. I also chaired a contributed session "High Dimensional Statistics" with six excellent speakers. This helps me gain experience in chairing, which is an important professional skill for academia.

I am grateful that the KAG fund covered my conference registration fee and transportation cost. Thank you again for your generous support!