A LETTER FROM THE CHAIR

Our discipline: This is a great time to be a statistician and it is not a fad; it's for the long run. Statistics is a key component of the new economy. Our discipline plays an important role in the information technology, biological, medical and genetic research, pharmaceutical research and drug development, financial technology, and more. The consequences are wonderful. It means a thriving discipline, with constantly new frontiers and challenges and a strong demand for knowledge and learning of statistics. This seems to be recognized by all major universities, as well as government and industry, all of which invest in expanding their statistics and related programs.

The department: Our graduate program enrolls approximately one hundred graduate students (approximately 30+ for Ph.D. and 60+ for MS). We enroll over three thousands students in our statistics classes. These are large numbers for the size of our fu ll-time faculty, and the department relies heavily on part-time-lecturers to help carry the teaching load. We are lucky to have a cadre of such dedicated and outstanding lecturers who come to us from the local academia and industry.

Recent highlights (listed in a random order): (1) Starting this year, our graduate program has a new, formal, track in biostatistics. This is in addition to our existing track (jointly with industrial engineering) in quality and productivity manage ment. (2) The university has awarded us $50,000 in computer money, and this will be used to upgrade and expand our computer lab and generally improve our computing environment. (3) Our Institute of Biostatistics, directed by Dr. Z. Ying, has had some majo r milestones: (a) a $25,000 research contribution from Ortho Biotech, (b) providing statistical support to funded projects at the Institute of Alcohol Studies. (4) Our Office of Statistical Consulting (OSC), directed by Dr. R. Berk, has had interesting r esearch/consulting activities which involved three of our graduate students as part of their TA responsibilities. Amongst this past year’s public-sector clients were UMDNJ and The State of New Jersey Division of Law (the Attorney General’s Office). Priva te-sector clients include Zeneca Corp. and Vertek Corp. As in the past, there were many inhouse clients: faculty, graduate students and researchers at some of the university institutes. There were also some calls from newspaper reporters wanting to che ck some numerical information. (5) Individual grant support for our faculty continues to be strong.

Personnel: We hired two new professors (with strong research interest in biostatistics). They are Don Hoover (from Merck and Johns Hopkins University) and John Kolassa (from the U. of Rochester). Don will join us in September of this year and John in January of 2000. Marcy Doremus joined our staff. She comes to us from the Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences where, among her other responsibilities, she helped develop and maintain their web-presence, developed databases for the graduate progr am and grant proposals. She is the new editor of our newsletter, and as you can see, already doing a great job.

Please visit us in person or on the web. Your comments and suggestions regarding our program, relationships with our alumni, etc. are always welcome. Please direct them to vardi@stat.rutgers.edu.

Yehuda Vardi