About / Portfolio

My name is Jerzy Wieczorek.
(I’m also civilstat on GitHub and Goodreads.
My email address is my [firstname dot lastname at colby dot edu].)

I am an Associate Professor of Statistics at Colby College, in the Department of Statistics.

I received my PhD in Statistics from the Department of Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University in May 2018, advised by Jing Lei. Before that, I was a mathematical statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau, working primarily in small area estimation, Bayesian statistics, and data visualization. I’ve also applied my statistics skillset in transportation engineering, neuroscience, and humanitarian and volunteer work. My other interests include languages and linguistics, education and teaching, etc.

I’m also a proud graduate of the inaugural class of Olin College, and later of Portland State University’s Statistics program.

All opinions expressed on this blog are my own and are not intended to represent those of my employers past or present.

My name is Polish. When I am around English speakers, I pronounce it “JER-zee vyeh-CHOR-ek”: you can listen to a recording here.

Curriculum Vitae (CV) (pdf, last updated Jan 2024)

Research

• Conformal prediction for complex sample survey data (paper, R code), at Colby College
• Artificial populations for evaluating small area estimators for forest data (arXiv), with the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the US Forest Service
• Cross validation for complex sample survey data (R package, paper), at Colby College
• Cross validation for forward selection with high-dimensional linear regression, at CMU
• Joint confidence regions for ranking populations, at the U.S. Census Bureau
• Think-aloud interviews for exploring student statistical reasoning, at CMU
• Member of the Statistics and Machine Learning Research Group and the Teaching Statistics Group, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics & Data Science
• Assessment of student learning and misconception identification in introductory statistics courses, at CMU
• Household poverty classification in data-scarce environments, in consultation with the PPI Alliance
• Functional connectivity analysis of autism using neuroimaging data, at CMU
• Artificial population and design-based simulations for small area estimation, also at the U.S. Census Bureau
• Ranking populations based on sample survey data, also at the U.S. Census Bureau
• Small area estimation with a zero-inflated beta model, also at the U.S. Census Bureau
• Highway bottleneck identification, at Portland State University’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Lab
• Minimum Kolmogorov-Smirnov Estimation (MKSE) for right-censored data, at Portland State University’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Visualization

• R package RankingProject (on CRAN) with visualizations for comparing independently-sampled populations
• Animated maps of election campaign travel using ggplot2 in R
• Interactively mapping significant differences, in R and in JavaScript
• Animation of recurring highway bottlenecks near Portland, OR, in MATLAB, for the ITS Lab
• Interface metaphors for network management software, at Olin College

Statistical volunteering

• Pro bono consulting on health and human rights survey data analysis, for StatAid and Lawry Research Associates International, including an analysis for the International Criminal Court trial of Bosco Ntaganda
• Former website co-chair and project coordinator, for Statistics Without Borders
• DataKind “datadive” participant and DataCorps volunteer, for DC Action for Children [datadive writeup; O’Reilly Visualization of the Week; final visualization; final writeup]

Teaching

• Courses at Colby College: see my Colby website
• Fall course “36-721: Statistical Graphics and Visualization” at Carnegie Mellon University [syllabus, materials]
• Summer course “36-309: Experimental Design for Behavioral and Social Sciences” at Carnegie Mellon University [syllabus]
• Workshops on “R 101,” “R Graphics,” and “Computer Applications for Small Area Estimation” at the U.S. Census Bureau [materials to be posted]
• Beginning Polish classes at the Global Language Network

Personal

• Cake decorating
• History/sociology of the accordion [undergraduate paper; slides from DC Nerd Nite]
• Rubik’s cubes [undergraduate paper and slides from MAA section meeting; Ultimate Solution to Megaminx]