Professor Ying Sun received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Texas A&M in 2011 followed by a two-year postdoctoral research position at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute and at the University of Chicago. She was an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University for a year before joining KAUST in 2014. At KAUST, Professor Sun established and leads the Environmental Statistics research group which works on developing statistical models and methods for complex data to address important environmental problems. She has made original contributions to environmental statistics, in particular in the areas of spatio-temporal statistics, functional data analysis, visualization, computational statistics, with an exceptionally broad array of applications. Professor Sun won two prestigious awards: the Early Investigator Award in Environmental Statistics presented by the American Statistical Association, and the Abdel El-Shaarawi Young Research Award from the International Environmetrics Society