Educational Background

• Ph.D., Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, 2011
• Master of Science, Statistics, Pennsylvania State University, 2008
• Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, University of Texas at Austin, 1997
• Bachelor of Arts, Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, 1997

Professional Background

• Chris worked as an actuary at USAA Life Insurance Company in San Antonio, Texas for over seven years. He worked on the pricing of various life insurance products, as well as asset/liability management, project management, and product management.
• Chris became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in 2004 and serves on various committees for the SOA.

Area of Expertise/Research

• Chris has a few different research areas that he is active in. He is interested in the dynamics of disease spread through populations, and in developing methods for using epidemic data to perform statistical inference on network models. He is currently working to apply these methods to biological epidemics as well as contagions within financial networks. Chris is interested in studying and developing techniques and algorithms to solve computationally intensive statistical inference problems; he has written a software package in R that performs statistical inference for contact networks based on epidemic data, using a Bayesian approach and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.

Publications

• Tibbits, Groendyke, Haran, Liechty. "Efficient Multidimensional Slice Sampling;" Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2013).

• Groendyke, Welch, Hunter. “A Network-based Analysis of the 1861 Hagelloch Measles Data" Biometrics (2012). 

• Groendyke. Introduction to Life Contingencies. Society of Actuaries (2012).

• Groendyke, Welch, Hunter.  “Bayesian Inference for Contact Networks Given Epidemic Data”.  Scandinavian Journal of Statistics (2011).

Presentations

• 2012 - "A Network-based Analysis of the 1861 Hagelloch Measles Data," Invited Talk, Statistical Society of Canada, Guelph.
• 2010 - "Bayesian Inference for Contact Networks Given Epidemic Data," Contributed Talk, International Biometric Society -- Eastern North America Region, New Orleans
• 2008 - "Automated Markov Chain Monte Carlo Based on the Ratio-of-Uniforms Transformation," Contributed Talk, Joint Statistical Meetings, Denver.

Schedule of Courses
Schedule Book for All Active and Available Future Terms, Groendyke, Christophe