Professor Xiaoming Huo is on leave from the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech to serve as a program director of Statistics at National Science Foundation (NSF) starting August 12, 2013.  His initial appointment at NSF is for a year, with a possibility of one year extension. He will be reviewing proposals, and making funding decisions on behalf of NSF. Huo will return to Georgia Tech regularly to maintain some of his research and education projects.  He will also be directing a newly created program called Computational and Data-enabled Science and Engineering. NSF is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering, and it is a great place to observe the splendid spectrum of scientific frontier.

 “I am excited about this opportunity to serve the community as well as the general public,” said Huo.  

Huo received the B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Science and Technology, China, in 1993, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in statistics from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. Since August 2006, he has been an Associate Professor with the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He represented China in the 30th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), which was held in Braunschweig, Germany, in 1989, and received a golden prize.

His research interests include statistical theory, data mining, and issues related to big data. He has made numerous contributions on topics such as sparse representation, wavelets, and statistical problems in detectability. His papers appeared in top journals, and some of them are highly cited. He is a senior member of IEEE since May 2004. He was a Fellow of IPAM in September 2004. He won the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2005. His work has led to an interview by Emerging Research Fronts in June 2006 in the field of Mathematics - every two months, one paper is selected.