New faculty profile: Shan Ba

For most students, taking the next step after graduation means saying goodbye to the university world for good; but for Shan Ba, the next step was onto another university campus.

Ba received his bachelor’s degree in China, where he’s originally from, in 2007 before coming to the United States to pursue a doctorate in industrial engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

He completed his doctorate this summer and is now an assistant professor of statistics in the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

This term, Ba is teaching a graduate level statistics course titled “Bayesian Data Analysis,” a special type of statistics that focuses on both data and prior information.

Ba said he’s very excited to be a teacher. “An important thing about teaching is not how smart I am or how knowledgeable I am, but to care how much the students understand what I teach,” Ba said. “I’ve been a student for a lot of years and I’ve seen teachers who only care about themselves and their research, and then I’ve seen teachers who really care about the students. I prefer the last one.”

During his first year of studying statistics as an undergrad, Ba felt he had no idea what he was doing, and his professors made him believe he wasn’t as good as he truly was.

That all changed the next year, though; his professors were more suppor-tive and his classes felt more applied. He attributes the vast improvement in his undergraduate experience to his professors.

Ba recognizes that statistics is typically a difficult class to grasp—especially for those outside of majors like engineering and math—but he encourages students to find a professor they like.

He believes that if the class is taught correctly and supportively, any student can find statistics enjoyable.