As others have mentioned, and as someone who does statistics, I think you're putting the emphasis on the wrong word in "postdoctoral statistician". If I solved

As others have mentioned, and as someone who does statistics, I think you're putting the emphasis on the wrong word in "postdoctoral statistician". If I solved a major open problem in geometry, Quanta could easily write "To the surprise of experts in the field, a professor of epidemiology has solved..." and they'd be correct in doing so.