Dr Hou

In an important day, my student—co-advised by Goodman in Applied Mathematics—Fengji Hou successfully defended his PhD dissertation. In his defense talk he showed different methods for doing inference within a model and over qualitatively different models, both in the context of exoplanet astronomy. Hou's work at NYU has had a huge impact on me; it has got me collaborating with Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and brought valuable techniques to astronomy from those fields. His influence goes way beyond his publication list, since he taught us how to use the affine-invariant sampler that is the guts of emcee and he helped us understand the relationships between adaptive importance sampling, nested sampling, annealing, and other methods. Congratulations Dr Hou!