Biography

I started my teaching career in the University of the Philippines at Los Banos in 1979, just after completing my Bachelor of Science degree (magna cum laude) in Statistics. I came to the United States as a graduate student at the Department of Statistics, Florida State University in Tallahassee, in 1982. As a graduate student, I was the recipient of the Ralph Bradley Dissertation Award at Florida State University.

After obtaining my PhD degree in Statistics in 1986, I started as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I became associate professor there in 1991, and full professor there from 1997 until 2000. From 1995-96, during a sabbatical leave, I was a visiting associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I again visited the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as visiting professor from 1999-2000 in both the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics. In August 2000, I joined as professor the Department of Statistics at the University of South Carolina. 

Over the years I have served in the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, and the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics. From 2017-23, I served as the Executive Secretary of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and from 2020-23, I served as Program Director in the Statistics Program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). In 2024, I was appointed Chair of the Department of Statistics at USC.

I am an Elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and an Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. I have also been awarded the Michael Mungo Graduate Teaching Award and the Educational Foundation Award for Research in Science, Mathematics and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. I am also the recipient of the Severino and Paz Koh Lectureship Award in Science of the Philippine-American Academy of Science and Engineering.

I have been the recipient of external funding awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency. My research interests include Mathematical Statistics, Survival Analysis, Reliability, Stochastic Processes, Biostatistics, Financial Statistics, High-Dimensional Inference, and Foundational Issues in Statistics.

Some Selected Publications

1. Baltazar-Aban, I. and Pena, E. (1995). Properties of Hazard-Based Residuals and Implications in Model Diagnostics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 90, 185-197.
2. Pena, E. (1998). Smooth Goodness-of-Fit Tests for Composite Hypothesis in Hazard-Based Models. The Annals of Statistics, 26, 1935-1971.
3. Pena, E., Strawderman, R. and Hollander, M. (2001). Nonparametric Estimation with Recurrent Event Data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 96, 1299-1315.
4. Hollander, M. and Pena, E. (2004). Nonparametric Methods in Reliability. Statistical Science, 19, 644-651.
5. Kvam, P. and Pena, E. (2005). Estimating Load-Sharing Properties in a Dynamic Reliability System. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 100, 262-272.
6. Pena, E. and Slate, E. (2006). Global Validation of Linear Model Assumptions. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 101, 341-354.
7. Pena, E., Slate, E. and Gonzalez, R. (2007). Semiparametric Inference for a General Class of Models for Recurrent Events. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 137, 1727-1747.
8. Pena, E., Habiger, J. and Wu, W. (2011). Power-Enhanced Family Wise Error and False Discovery Rate Controlling Multiple Decision Functions. The Annals of Statistics. 39, 556-583.
9. Habiger, J. and Pena, E. (2011). Randomized P-Values and Nonparametric Procedures in Multiple Testing. Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, 23, 583-604.
10. Pena, E. (2016). Asymptotics for a General Class of Recurrent Event Models. Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, 28, 716-735.
11. Bottai, M., Kim, T., Lieberman, B., Luta, G., Pena, E. (2022). On Optimal Correlation-Based Prediction. The American Statistician, 76, 313-321.