Shelby Cox has been awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (MSCA-PF 2025) and will join our group in June 2026.

Shelby is currently a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (Leipzig). Her project, Tropical Statistics: New Frontiers in Max-Linear Data Analysis, will develop new statistical foundations for tropical linear spaces, a rapidly emerging area at the intersection of algebra, geometry, and statistics.

While classical statistics assumes that data live in Euclidean spaces, many modern problems involve non-Euclidean structures, such as polyhedral complexes arising in areas like phylogenetics, extreme value theory, and economic networks. Shelby’s research aims to establish fundamental statistical tools for analyzing such data, opening new methodological directions for applications across several scientific fields.

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships, funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program, are among the most competitive postdoctoral funding schemes in Europe. UPF was awarded 12 MSCA fellowships in the 2025 call, making it the leading university in Spain and the second most successful research institution overall.