Sierra Merkes
Collegiate Assistant Professor
Education:
- 2022 – Ph.D. in Statistics, Virginia Tech (Advisor: Scotland Leman)
- 2017 – M.S. in Statistics, Virginia Tech
- 2016 – B.S. in Mathematics, Radford University
Experience:
- 2022 – Present: Collegiate Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech
- 2020 – 2022: Instructor of Record, Virginia Tech
Awards & Honors:
- 2021 AIAA Sensor Systems and Information Fusion Best Paper Award – Fall 2021
- Jesse C. Arnold Teaching Award, Virginia Tech, 2020 - 2021
- Rose Costain Graduate Fellowship Award for Outstanding Departmental Leadership, Virginia Tech – 2019, 2020, 2021
- Corporate Partner Scholarship, Virginia Tech – Fall 2016
Professional Memberships:
- American Statistical Association
- Member of Conference Organizing Committee, 2025, Women in Data Science (WiDS) - Blacksburg
- Member of Conference Organizing Committee, 2024, 75th Anniversity Department of Statistics Conference.
- Member of Conference Organizing Committee, 2024, Design and Analysis of Experiment (DAE) Conference
- CMDA 2005: Integrated Quantitative Sciences
- STAT 2094: Basic R for Statistics
- STAT/CMDA 3274: Introduction to Sports Analytics
- STAT 4705: Statistics for Engineers
- STAT 4714: Statistics for Electrical Engineers
- STAT 4214: Methods of Regression Analysis
- STAT 5214G: Advanced Methods of Regression
- Statistics Education
- Sports Analytics
- S.Merkes, (2022); “Robust Bayesian Anomaly Detection Methods for Large Scale Sensor Systems”, Dissertation, Virginia Tech, 2022.
- A. Defreitas, W. N. Alexander, W. J. Devenport, S. Merkes, S. Leman, E. Smith, and A. Borgoltz, (2022); “Anomaly detection in wind tunnel experiments by principal component analysis.”, AIAA Journal, 60(4), 2297-2307.
- S. Merkes, S. Leman, E. Smith, A. Defreitas, W. N. Alexander, and W. J. Devenport, (2021); “A Bayesian Mixture Model Approach to Anomaly Detection with Application to Wind Tunnel Experiments", AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum, https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-1268.
- A. Defreitas, W. N. Alexander, W. J. Devenport, S. Merkes, S. Leman, E.Smith, and A. Borgoltz, (2020); Improved Anomaly Detection in Experimental Wind Tunnel Data using PCA”, AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum, https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2020-1198.
- S. Merkes, A. Defreitas, E. Smith, W. N. Alexander, W. J. Devenport, and S. Leman, (2019); “Robust Anomaly Detection for Large Scale Multi-Type Sensor Systems", AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum, https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2019-2265.
