Jessalyn Sebastian

PhD Candidate in Statistics at the University of California, Irvine

I am a PhD candidate studying Statistics at UCI, advised by Dr. Volodymyr Minin. My research interests include stochastic processes, model robustness and prior sensitivity analysis, and more broadly Bayesian modeling with applications in infectious disease epidemiology. I am also interested in statistics education.

My current methodological work focuses on fast, interpretable Bayesian methods for smoothing and inference using Gaussian process priors with Markov properties. In addition, I work on applied projects using Bayesian phylogenetic methods to study respiratory virus and tuberculosis transmission.