James Wilson

James is Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and an American Statistical Association PSTAT accredited statistician. He is passionate about statistical and data science research and education and strives to make the tools and techniques for data-driven decision making understandable and accessible for his students, collaborators, and industry partners. As an educator, James shows students how to critically think about data and analyses, rather than just running the most accessible app or program to do the work.

Professor Wilson is an award-winning researcher with expertise in brain imaging, unsupervised and interpretable machine learning, and statistical network analysis. His work which has led to over 45 publications, has been funded by 8 different research grants from the NIH and NSF and has been mentioned on NBC Nightly News. As Chair, James seeks to use his unique perspective as an educator, researcher, and collaborator with tech industry partners — ranging from data science teams at the San Francisco 49’ers to Reddit — to foster an educational environment that enriches students from both academic and industry objectives.

• Statistical network analysis
• Mental health and brain imaging
• Interpretable machine learning
• Reinforcement learning

• Chair, Department of Mathematics and Statistics (2025 - Present)
• Director, BS Data Science Program (2017 - 2020)
• Chair of Data Institute Conference (2017, 2019)

• PhD, Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina (2015)
• MS, Mathematical Sciences, Clemson University (2010)
• BS, Mathematics and Chemistry, Campbell University (2008)

• University of San Francisco Centennial Innovation Fund Award (2025)
• American Statistical Association Accredited Professional Statistician (PSTAT) (2025)
• Top 10% of most read papers in Alzheimer's and Dementia (2023)
• Eastern North American Region Distinguished Student Paper Award (2017)
• UNC Chapel Hill Graduate Student Teaching Award in Statistics (2015)

• Stillman, P., Wilson, J.D., Kalkstein, D., and Ferguson, M. The Temporal Dynamics of Self-Control. (2025) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122 (45) e2501425122.

• Parr, T., Hamrick, J., and Wilson, J.D. (2024) Nonparametric feature impact and importance. Information Sciences 653, 119563.

• Wilson, J.D., Gerlach, A., Aizenstein, H., and Andreescu, C. (2024) Sex matters: Acute functional connectivity changes as markers of remission in late-life depression differ by sex. Molecular Psychiatry 28 (12), 5228-5236.

• Lee, J., Li, G., and Wilson J.D. (2020) Varying-coefficient models for dynamic networks. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 152: 107052.

• Wilson, J.D., Palowitch, J., Bhamidi, S., and Nobel, A.B. (2017) Community extraction in multilayer networks with heterogeneous community structure. The Journal of Machine Learning Research 18(1), 5458 - 5506.

• National Science Foundation Grant NSF DMS - 1830547: Spatio-Temporal Data Analysis with Dynamic Network Models. August, 2018 - July, 2021. (Co-PI)
• National Science Foundation Grant NSF DMS - 1841307: The Annual Data Institute Conference (March, 2019). (PI)