It has been two years since our last newsletter, and a lot has happened. Here is a brief summary.

The discipline: Regardless of recent economic swings, modern economy is fundamentally information-based and information hungry and we, as statisticians, all benefit from this ‘newly-discovered’ importance of our discipline. Challenges in extracting information from data are everywhere and they bring about a constant pressure for expanding the horizons of our discipline. Traditional areas of applications such as government statistics, social/industrial statistics, and bio-statistics have grown in scope as relevant data sets become ever larger and more accessible. Likewise, advances in new areas are often dependent on our ability to process and understand large data sets. One may ask: what’s in common to genetics, on-line knowledge retrieval, DNA signature, consumer profiling, data mining, and medical imaging? Although they seem fundamentally far apart, strong dependency on statistical methodology is common to all. All this translates to a strong demand for statistics methodology and outstanding career opportunities for statisticians. In contrast to the laymen image of statistics as a ‘dry’ subject, what’s happening in our field is simply exciting and investing in a graduate or post-graduate degree in statistics are one of the best investments a young person can make.

The department: Our faculty/staff sizes are twenty/five respectively. Currently, our graduate program enrolls 53 MS students and 28 Ph.D. students, while the undergraduate program enrolls 39 majors and 54 minors. (According to figures of the American Statistical Association, our department has traditionally been in the top three, nationwide, in number of undergraduate majors.) In addition we enroll about 3000 students in our classes. This last number is expected to grow soon to well over 4000, as we are in the process of taking over the teaching of introductory statistics for psychology, which traditionally has been taught internally by the Psychology Department.

Recent appointments (past two years):

We are all excited about our recent hires. They substantially contribute to keeping us a well-balanced top-notch department that embraces all aspects of statistics: methodology, theory, and applications.

Don Hoover joined us from Johns Hopkins University. Don received his Ph.D. from Stanford, and has a strong research agenda in biostatistics and epidemiology. Don is also a member of Rutgers’ Health Policy and Aging Institute.

John Kolassa joined us from the University of Rochester. John received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has a strong research agenda in applications, in biostatistics, and in mathematical statistics.

Juan K. Lin joined us from MIT. Juan received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago, and has a strong research agenda focusing on Multivariate analysis, probabilistic networks, and machine learning.

David Madigan joined us from the University of Washington, after relatively short excursions to the telecommunication and high-tech industries. David received his Ph.D. from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and has a strong research agenda in Bayesian models, knowledge discovery, data-mining, and graphical models.

Rebecka Jornsten, a new Ph.D. from Berkeley, will join us in January, 2002. Her research interests are applied statistics (especially in biological and interdisciplinary applications), signal processing, and time series analysis.

Rob Dunne joined our staff as a computer system administrator. This was a long overdue appointment! To appreciate the scope of his work note that the department has two servers, an updated computer lab with twenty-five computers plus over thirty networked PC/work-stations spread around the department. In addition, we run specialized statistical software packages that are often used in classes and projects.

The External-Review: It’s a common practice for a university administration to ask distinguished scholars to visit an academic unit, audit its operation, and report to the university about the strengths and weaknesses of the unit. Such reviews usually take place every eight (plus-minus) years, and they are helpful to the university for long term planning purposes, and for monitoring the quality of its programs and its resources. Last year, such an external-review committee audited our department. The committee included Prof. Mary Ellen Bock (Purdue U.), Prof. Allan Sampson (Pittsburgh U.), Prof. Grace Yang (U. of Maryland) and Prof. Nancy Reid (U. of Toronto). The report was generally very favorable and gave us very high marks for the quality of our faculty ("top five among all state universities") and programs.

Thanks to our contributors. If you read these lines, there is a good chance that you are one of many who benefited from our program. Your generosity ensures that many young talents will continue in your footsteps. It is gratifying to see how many of you are giving back to the very enterprise that, in all likelihood, was your best investments ever! Thank you!!! Your contributions are very much appreciated.

Goodbye to a friend: Our dear friend, mentor, and long time colleague, Professor Herbert (Herb) Robbins, passed away. Our sky is a bit darker without him. Please read the obituary in these pages.

Please visit us in person or on the web and give us your feedback regarding our program, improved contacts with alumni, refresher courses, and whatever else you might find relevant.

Yehuda