Sonja Petrović (statistician) facts for kids

Sonja Petrović is a Serbian-American scientist. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She studies mathematical statistics and algebraic statistics. This means she uses math to understand data and patterns. She also looks at how networks connect, like social media or computer networks. In 2015, she became part of a special group called the International Statistics Institute.

Education and Early Career

Sonja Petrović went to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She earned her first degree in applied mathematics in 2003. She also studied music while she was there.

She then went to the University of Kentucky to get her Ph.D. in mathematics. Her special area was called commutative algebra. This is a part of math that studies certain kinds of number systems. She finished her Ph.D. in 2008.

Post-Doctoral Work and Teaching

After her Ph.D., Dr. Petrović worked at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This was from 2008 to 2011. In 2009, she was a research fellow in North Carolina. She helped with a program about using math in biology and statistics.

From 2011 to 2013, she was a professor at Pennsylvania State University. Then, in 2013, she joined the Illinois Institute of Technology. She became an associate professor there in 2017.

International Research and Awards

Dr. Petrović has traveled to many places for her research. In 2011, she visited the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden. She worked on how math shapes things in the real world.

In 2016, she went to the Isaac Newton Institute in the United Kingdom. There, she studied how networks work using math. In 2019, she helped organize a summer school in Germany. It was about randomness and learning in math.

She has also won awards for her work. In 2015, she received a research award from Illinois Tech. In 2018, she won an award for excellent teaching.