Friends of UF Statistics,
I wanted to provide an update of what is currently going on with the department.
I am happy to report that we hired one new faculty member in Spring 2025 (Karina Gelis Cadena); a short bio can be found in the newsletter. We had also hired a tenure track faculty member but due to unforeseen circumstances, she will be unable to join us this fall.
Three of our current faculty were promoted this year. Joey Antonelli and Leo Duan were promoted to associate professor with tenure. Beth Johnson was promoted to instructional associate professor. Congratulations to all three!
The statistics major continues to grow, and the data science major is growing at an even faster rate. Combined, we have now have OVER 500 majors.
Our graduates at the undergraduate and graduate level have accepted top positions in graduate school (for the former) and academia and industry (for the latter). Recent highlights for graduating undergraduate majors including attending graduate programs (in Fall 2025) at UCLA, Northwestern, U of Oregon and Cornell and jobs at Capital One, Amazon, Comcast, American Express, Accenture and Florida Blue. Our graduate students found placements in industry (Meta, Microsoft and Bridger Investment Partners), postdoc positions (U of Chicago and Friedrich-Alexander U [Germany]), teaching positions (U of Florida) and research faculty positions (U of Dhaka [Bangledesh]).
Our undergraduate scholarship, the Joe Glover Scholarship for Data Science was awarded for a second time this year. The recipient was Divij Goyal.
And we continue to have support from Pfizer who gifted the department another Pfizer fellowship. The new awardee will be second year student, Haidyn Sekeres.
I would also like to acknowledge our graduate students who received awards, including Heejun Shin (who graduated and is now doing a postdoc at Harvard) and Zhuochao Huang.
On the professional service side, Professor Hani Doss continued his term as co-editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B. And Kshitij Khare started as editor of Sankhya A and I started as co-editor of Bayesian Analysis.
Faculty continue to be successful with external funding with new grants from NIH and NSF awarded to department faculty this past year.
The 2025 Winter Workshop (partially funded by Infotech) focused on Bayesian
computation. Further details can be found in the story below.
Our Challis Lecturer this past fall was Francesca Dominici from Harvard. Details can be found in the story below.
This past May, the study abroad program to the UK (run by Beth Johnson and David Holmes) had another successful (and expanded) implementation (details in the below story).
We also co-hosted another successful ASA DataFest: https://stat.ufl.edu/featured/2025/datafest-2025/
I look forward to hearing from you and let me know the next time you are in Gainesville.
Go Gators! And what a great basketball season!!
Best regards,
Mike Daniels