UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Cory McCartan, assistant professor of statistics, has been honored with the inaugural Hoben and Patricia Thomas and Thomas and Ann Hettmansperger Early Career Professorship in Statistics. The professorship, endowed by emeritus professors Hoben Thomas and Thomas Hettmansperger and their families, provides financial support and encouragement during the critical first years of the holder’s academic career and encourages interdisciplinary collaborations.
“We are thrilled to be able to honor Cory with this professorship,” said Nicole Lazar, department head and professor of statistics. “And we are grateful to the Hettmansperger and Thomas families for their foresight in recognizing the value of supporting early career scientists. Cory joined the department this year and will be able to hit the ground running to establish his exciting research program because of this support.”
The Hettmanspergers and Thomases established the professorship to help facilitate early career professors having meaningful experiences at Penn State and to build the foundations of interdisciplinary collaborations like the one that shaped the careers of Thomas Hettmansperger and Hoben Thomas.
“I’m immensely grateful to the department for this honor, and to the Hettmanspergers and Thomases for funding the position,” McCartan said. “The support will be a big help in continuing to build out an interdisciplinary research agenda in statistical methodology and political science.”
McCartan studies methodological and applied problems in the social sciences, with particular emphasis on political and geographic data. In his research he has developed algorithmic tools for studying the problem of gerrymandering in legislative redistricting. He helped start the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project at Harvard in 2021. He also develops and maintains a number of open-source software packages in the statistical programming language R for redistricting, statistical analysis, and visualization.
Software that McCartan helped develop — called redist — received the Best Statistical Software Award, for statistical software that makes a significant research contribution, from the Society for Political Methodology in 2022. McCartan has served as an expert witness in voting rights cases for the NAACP and the ACLU. His research has been published in journals including Science Advances, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Political Science Review, the Harvard Data Science Review, and the Annals of Applied Statistics.
McCartan earned a doctoral degree in statistics at Harvard University in 2023 and a bachelor’s degree in math from Grinnell College in 2019. He worked as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University for a year before joining the Penn State faculty in 2024.