2006 VIGRE Graduate Student Travel Fund Recipients
Joel Hanson
This summer I attended the JSM in Seattle. I attended an interesting short course by Lahiri on small area estimation. I also presented a paper entitled causal inference based on directed acyclic graphical models and the randomization distribution: a probability-sampling approach. The presentation was particularly rewarding because several of the people in attendance were personally acquainted with Morris Hansen—-whose 1983 paper warning about the dangers of model-dependent sampling I was extended to causal inference. Finally, I interviewed with multiple employers at the JSM career center, and I discovered quite a bit about life as a statistician in the real world outside academia. This trip was made possible thanks to VIGRE funding.