Mission

While novel methodology for the statistical analysis of such and other data is developed both inside and outside of Statistics, the development of a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of these methodologies is one of the primary missions of Statistics. This requires a statistician to have methodological, analytical and computational skills and knowledge. For scientific collaborations, an understanding of the corresponding subject matter is also essential. The combination of all of this makes statistics an exciting field with numerous opportunities for statisticians to contribute significantly to the advancement of scientific knowledge.The mission of the department might be formulated as providing a statistical education that reflects the broadness of the field of statistics, thus adequately preparing the students for employment in industry, government, or academics. Also, the Department of Statistics is committed to advance the statistical knowledge through active research.

The combination of this requires offering a broad range of courses, as well as maintaining a body of faculty members with a wide range of research interests. The courses offered in the department include general introductory courses, more specialized, hands-on-data courses in regression and analysis of variance, statistical computing, multivariate statistics as well as graduate level applied and mathematical statistics courses, and many more. Research interests of faculty members include, for example, theoretical statistics, statistics for high-dimensional data, time series analysis, nonparametric modeling and inference, functional data analysis, survival analysis, statistics in bioinformatics/genetics, statistics in finance and reliability theory.

The Department hosts two graduate programs, one in Statistics, and one in Biostatistics, with a current total of about 65 graduate students. The enrollment in our Undergraduate Majors (a B.S. and A.B. in Statistics) currently ranges at 70 students. More …