NEWS & EVENTS

By Shawn Hutchins

Philip Ernst has been promoted to full professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2022.

Ernst began his career at Rice University as an assistant professor in 2014 after receiving his doctorate in statistics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was awarded the Dobelman Family Junior Chair in 2018 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2019.

Ernst is widely known for his research in applied probability, with a focus on exact distribution theory, mathematical finance, mathematical statistics, operations research, optimal stopping, queueing systems, statistical inference for stochastic processes, and stochastic control. His efforts to solve longstanding open problems have led to over 30 peer-reviewed journal papers to date.

One key example of Ernst’s research contributions is his 2017 Annals of Statistics paper on Yule's "nonsense correlation." This spurred his present research focus on statistical tests for independence for pairs of paths of Gaussian processes, with applications to climate science and financial markets.

Ernst's work on Yule’s “nonsense correlation” led to his collaboration on robust co-movement measures for portfolio optimization with Hudson Bay Capital’s CEO Sander Gerber and Harry Markowitz, the 1990 Nobel Memorial Laureate in Economic Sciences and adjunct professor of finance and accounting at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management.  Results of the research were published in the Journal of Portfolio Management in February 2022, with both Ernst and 2019 Rice statistics doctoral alumnus Yinsen Miao serving as co-authors.

In his research agenda, Ernst has shed valuable insight into extremely challenging problems in applied probability using tools from Gaussian processes, Markov processes, martingale theory, and fractional Brownian motion. His research has been supported by the U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigator Program, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation. Ernst currently serves on the editorial boards of several leading journals and will be a visiting international research chair in the Department of Mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in the summer of 2022.

Ernst has been widely recognized by Rice University for excellence in both research and teaching. In 2022, Ernst received the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Rice’s most prestigious teaching award, awarded annually to one faculty member based on the votes of alumni who graduated within the past two, three and five years. In 2019, he received the George R. Brown School of Engineering’s coveted Teaching and Research Excellence Award.

Ernst is also a recipient of numerous national and international research awards. In 2022, he was elected to the Leadership Academy of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). In 2020, Ernst was named the inaugural winner of INFORMS Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award for Excellence in Operations Research. In 2018, Ernst received the Tweedie New Researcher Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, widely considered to be the highest honor for excellence in research for an early-career statistician. In that same year, he received the Young Investigator Award from the Mathematical Sciences Division of the Army Research Office.