Congratulations, Dr. Nadkarni!

I was happy to be in the audience today as Dahlia Nadkarni defended her dissertation “The incidental parameter problem in network analysis for neural spiking data”. Our research has overlapped in a few areas so I can attest that the work is solid. I hence have to imagine that all of the time reserved for her to be grilled by her committee on minor technical details was instead spent fielding repeated questions from Stu Geman on deeper matters. That is, the question of why a technique that can pick out dynamics behind highly nonstationary high-dimensional data was being applied to something boring like understanding the brain and not to making billions of dollars for a hedge fund.

In full seriousness, though, it was really cool to see a substantial application of conditional inference developed both broadly and deeply and conveyed so accessibly.