Friends of UF Statistics,
I wanted to provide you all an update on the current happenings within the department.
I am happy to report that in Spring 2023, we welcomed three new faculty members to our team: Sohom Bhattacharya, Ziping Xu, and David Lindberg. The latter two will begin their tenure in Fall 2024. You can find brief bios of each of them in the newsletter.
Our statistics major continues to experience growth, and the data science major is expanding even more rapidly. Together, we now have close to 400 majors. Additionally, we have introduced a new data analytics certificate, starting in Summer 2022. This certificate is designed to provide essential data analytics training to majors in the social sciences and humanities.
Our graduates, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, have achieved remarkable success. Undergraduates have been accepted into prestigious graduate programs at institutions such as Brown, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins, while others have secured positions at prominent companies and organizations like Mayo Clinic, Deloitte, Wells Fargo, Florida Blue, IBM, Fidelity Investments, and DraftKings. Our graduate students have taken positions in both government and industry including the FDA, Uber, and Visa Research.
We have made updates to our graduate core curriculum, effective for the incoming Fall 2023 class. These additions include a two-semester computing sequence covering optimization and (Markov chain) Monte Carlo methods, as well as advanced regression, which introduces students to statistical machine learning and other relevant topics.
In terms of support and recognition, we are grateful to have received the Joe Glover Scholarship for Data Science, a generous gift from our past provost, Joe Glover. Pfizer has also continued to support us with another Pfizer fellowship, which is currently benefiting Stephen Goodman during his internship at Pfizer this summer.
Our graduate students have also been recognized for their outstanding achievements. Zhaoyan Song and Yu Zheng were joint recipients of the Mendenhall Award for being the top first-year students. Zhumengmeng Jin received the Statistics Faculty Award, given to the top PhD graduate, and Lingxiao Zhou was awarded the Jana F. Col Memorial Award, presented to a top PhD student after passing the written qualifying exam.
Moreover, our faculty members have been making notable contributions to the field. Two of our professors were appointed to prestigious editorial positions. I was honored to be selected for the inaugural statistical editor board for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, and Professor Hani Doss was chosen as the next co-editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B.
We are proud of our faculty’s success in securing external funding, with new grants from NIH and NSF awarded to some of our department faculty members this past year.
For the soccer/football enthusiasts among us, our Challis lecturer, Gareth Roberts from the University of Warwick, delivered a fascinating lecture on “The FIFA 2022 World Cup Draw: Bias and Corrections.” You can find the recording of the lecture here.
Additionally, in May, our study abroad program to the UK, led by Drs. Johnson and Holmes, had another successful run. Read more about the program here.
Looking ahead, I am thrilled to share that the 2024 Winter Workshop, partially funded by Infotech, will be jointly organized with the UF Department of Economics and will focus on causal inference.
I eagerly await hearing from you and hope you’ll let me know the next time you plan to visit Gainesville.
Go Gators!
Best regards,
Mike Daniels
Professor, Chair and Andrew Banks Family Endowed Chair