Philip Ernst, associate professor of statistics (STAT) at Rice, is a 2021 recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching.

Administered by the Center for Teaching Excellence, the award recognizes top Rice instructors as determined by the votes of alumni who have graduated within the past two, three and five years.

Ernst earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in STAT from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and 2014, respectively, joined the Rice faculty in 2014 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2019.

In 2018, Ernst received the Tweedie New Researcher Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, widely considered the highest honor for excellence in research for an early-career statistician or applied probabilist. In the same year, he received the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award. In 2020, Ernst was named the inaugural winner of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Don Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award for Excellence in Operations Research, the first institute-wide early-career award.

In 2019 Ernst received the Teaching and Research Excellence Award from the George R. Brown School of Engineering. From Rice, he has also won the Nicolas Salgo Distinguished Teacher Award and the Sophia Meyer Farb Prize for Teaching and the Graduate Student Association Teaching/Mentoring Award.

Ernst’s research interests include applied probability, exact distribution theory, mathematical finance, mathematical statistics, operations research, optimal stopping, queueing systems, statistical inference for stochastic processes and stochastic control.

Author: PATRICK KURP