Heike Hofmann (born 16 April 1972) is a

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

and Professor in the Department of Statistics at

Iowa State University Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ...

Education

She earned an

MSc MSC may refer to: Computers * Message Sequence Chart * Microelectronics Support Centre of UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory * MIDI Show Control * MSC Malaysia (formerly known as Multimedia Super Corridor) * USB mass storage device class (USB MSC ...

in Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science, and a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in Statistics, from the

University of Augsburg The University of Augsburg (german: Universität Augsburg) is a university located in the Universitätsviertel section of Augsburg, Germany. It was founded in 1970 and is organized in 8 Faculties. The University of Augsburg is a relatively you ...

Augsburg Augsburg (; bar , Augschburg , links=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German , label=Swabian German, , ) is a city in Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, around west of Bavarian capital Munich. It is a university town and regional seat of the ' ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

in 1998 and 2000, respectively.

Career and research

Hoffman's research interests are in

statistical graphics Statistical graphics, also known as statistical graphical techniques, are graphics used in the field of statistics for data visualization. Overview Whereas statistics and data analysis procedures generally yield their output in numeric or tabul ...

exploratory data analysis In statistics, exploratory data analysis (EDA) is an approach of analyzing data sets to summarize their main characteristics, often using statistical graphics and other data visualization methods. A statistical model can be used or not, but pr ...

, visual inference, visualization of large data and

statistical computing Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the bond between statistics and computer science. It means statistical methods that are enabled by using computational methods. It is the area of computational science (or scientific computin ...

She is currently Professor in the Department of Statistics at

, and faculty member of the

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

and

Computational Biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

and

Human Computer Interaction Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, an ...

programs. In her research on

interactive data visualization Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is nu ...

she has provided new approaches for plotting

multivariate Multivariate may refer to: In mathematics * Multivariable calculus * Multivariate function * Multivariate polynomial In computing * Multivariate cryptography * Multivariate division algorithm * Multivariate interpolation * Multivariate optical c ...

categorical data In statistics, a categorical variable (also called qualitative variable) is a variable that can take on one of a limited, and usually fixed, number of possible values, assigning each individual or other unit of observation to a particular group or ...

using

mosaic plot A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

s, and making interactions with these plots, and linking between plots. She was the primary development of the software MANET and contributed to the development of the software

GGobi GGobi is a free statistical software tool for interactive data visualization. GGobi allows extensive exploration of the data with Interactive dynamic graphics. It is also a tool for looking at multivariate data. R can be used in sync with G ...

. More recent software include the R packages x3prplus, geomnet, nullabor, gglogo, peptider, discreteRV, ggboxplots, ggparallel, dbData, HLMdiag, lvboxplots, MergeGUI, MissingDataGUI. Her work on examining the inflow of corporate cash into the 2012 US presidential election can be read in ''Chance'' magazine. Heike Hofmann is the author of more than 50 journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters and edited one book. She is a Fellow of the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

. She has supervised or co-supervised 8 doctoral theses, including

Hadley Wickham Hadley Alexander Wickham (born 14 October 1979) is a statistician from New Zealand and Chief Scientist at Posit, PBC (former RStudio Inc.) and an adjunct Professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice Un ...

and

Yihui Xie Yihui Xie ( zh, 谢益辉) is a Chinese statistician, data scientist and software engineer for RStudio. He is the principal author of the open-source software package Knitr for data analysis in the R (programming language), R programming language, ...

Honors and awards

She was elected a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

in 2014.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hofmann, Heike Living people 1972 births Scientists from Augsburg University of Augsburg alumni American statisticians German statisticians Women statisticians 20th-century American women scientists American women academics Iowa State University faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association R (programming language) people 21st-century American women