Rate My Professor Ting Wang

Professor Ting Wang is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago, where she has served since 2012. She completed her BSc and MSc in Mathematical Statistics at Beijing Normal University, graduating from her Master's programme one year ahead of schedule. She earned her PhD in Statistics from Massey University, with her thesis recognised on the Dean's List of Exceptional Doctoral Theses. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Massey University's Volcanic Risk Solutions (2010-2011) and a visiting research fellowship at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo (July-November 2012), Wang progressed at Otago from Lecturer (2012-2016) and Senior Lecturer (2017-2020) to Associate Professor (2021-2025) and Professor from 2026. She held the role of Associate Dean (Research) for the Division of Sciences from 2019 to 2022 and has been an Associate Editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics since 2017.

Wang's research centres on the development of novel statistical models bridging statistics and geophysics, with expertise in point process theory, hidden Markov models, stochastic processes, and survival analysis. Her applications focus on forecasting earthquakes, slow slip events, volcanic eruptions, and geomagnetic storms. Key publications include Wang et al., "Earthquake forecasting from paleoseismic records," Nature Communications (2024); Allen and Wang, "Hidden Markov models for low-frequency earthquake recurrence," The American Statistician (2024); Wang et al., "Forecasting eruptions at poorly known volcanoes using analogs and multivariate renewal processes," Geophysical Research Letters (2022); Wang et al., "Bayesian modelling of marked point processes with incomplete records: Volcanic eruptions," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (2020); and Buckby et al., "Model checking for hidden Markov models," Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2020). In 2022, she was awarded $1 million from the MBIE Smart Ideas fund to create a probabilistic forecasting tool for great earthquakes, collaborating with experts from Otago, Massey, Victoria universities, and GNS Science. She has led projects funded by the Marsden Fund, MBIE Endeavour, EQC, and National Science Challenges. Her accolades include the 2022 Littlejohn Research Award, the New Zealand Statistical Association's premier research award; the 2017 University of Otago Early Career Award for Distinction in Research; and the 2013 Worsley Early Career Research Award from the New Zealand Statistical Association.