Sean Jewell

I am a Research Scientist on the HealthAI team at Apple. I received my PhD in Statistics at the University of Washington advised by Daniela Witten, my MSc in Statistics at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, and my BSc in Applied Mathematics from McMaster University.

My research interests are in developing new methods for applied problems using tools from statistics, machine learning, and optimization.

My PhD work focused on the estimation of structural changes, and the associated uncertainty of these estimates, in time series data. We introduced a new selective inference framework that allows us to quantify the uncertainty associated with an estimated changepoint through a p-value or a confidence interval. See my project website for additional details.

This work was motivated by an experimental technique called calcium imaging that allows for simultaneous measurement of hundreds or thousands of neurons in behaving animals. For each neuron, this process results in a time series that can be used to estimate the firing times. My website for this project contains additional details and examples.

In the past, I have also been involved in work on controlling the false discovery rate, modeling spatial data, Bayesian phylogenetics, and financial mathematics.