Yulia Gel

Yulia Gel is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech and serves as a Part-Time Program Director-Expert at the National Science Foundation (NSF). She holds a MSc (summa cum laude) and PhD in Mathematics from Saint Petersburg State University (Russia) and completed a postdoc in Statistics at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on uncertainty quantification in AI, statistical foundations of data science, spatio-temporal processes, and applications in climate science, healthcare, and blockchain analytics. She has received prestigious awards including the NSF Director’s Award (2023), ASA Distinguished Achievement Medal (2018), and TIES Abdel El-Shaarawi Award (2014). Gel has led grants on wildfire prediction, climate informatics, and blockchain data science. She serves on editorial boards of Statistica Sinica, Electronic Journal of Statistics, and Technometrics, and organizes workshops on AI for climate sustainability and fragile Earth systems. Her research group develops topological and geometric methods for graph neural networks, with applications to digital twins, environmental justice, and public health.

Education: MSc (1997), PhD (2000) in Mathematics from Saint Petersburg State University; Postdoc in Statistics at University of Washington (2001–2003). Past roles include Professor at University of Texas at Dallas (2015–2024) and Associate Professor at University of Waterloo (2004–2014). Selected visiting positions include NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (2016–2017) and Isaac Newton Institute (2016–2017). She has pioneered statistical software packages like snowboot and funtimes for network inference and time-series analysis.

Awards highlight her contributions to environmetrics and statistical methodologies. Current projects include NSF-funded research on AI-driven wildfire prediction and blockchain analytics for climate resilience. Her lab’s recent work emphasizes topological methods (e.g., zigzag persistence) for graph-based forecasting and adversarial robustness.