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 three more new faculty in Spring 2024 (Satarupa Bhattacharjee, Thomas Ippolito, and Benjamin Roycraft). Short bios on each of them can be found in the newsletter. In addition, David Lindberg, who we hired in Spring 2023, will start this fall as well.
We were saddened this past year as senior lecturer Deb Burr passed away. She will be missed.
We were disappointed that Professor Brett Presnell retired at the end of the spring semester after serving as a faculty member at UF since 1990, including a five-year term leading the department from 2012 to 2017.
The statistics major continues to grow, and the data science major is growing at an even faster rate. Combined, we have almost 400 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 includeacceptance into graduate programs within University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, and Mayo Clinic School of Medicine and jobs at Bank of American, Iron EagleX, New York Life Insurance Company, Florida Blue, and Centene Corporation. And for graduate students, we had placements in government and industry (the FDA, American Express, and Huawei), postdoc positions (New York University and Harvard), and tenure track positions (Florida State University).
Our undergraduate scholarship, the Joe Glover Scholarship for Data Science was awarded for a second time this year. The recipient was Matheus Kunzler Maldaner.
And we continue to have support from Pfizer who gifted the department another Pfizer fellowship. The current awardee, Steven Goodman completed another internship at Pfizer this summer.
I would also like to acknowledge our graduate students who received awards. Yaozhi Yang won the Mendenhall Award (given to the top first year student). Partha Sarkar won the Statistics Faculty Award (given to the top PhD graduate). Swarnali Raha won the Jana F. Col Memorial Award (given to a top PhD student after passing the written qualifying exam). Finally, Heejun Shin won a travel award to the Joint Statistical Meetings (2024, Portland) from the Biometrics section of the American Statistical Association.
On the professional service side, Professor Hani Doss started his term as co-editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B.
Department faculty continue to be successful with external funding with new grants from NIH and NSF awarded this past year.
This past May, the study abroad program to the UK (run by Drs. Johnson and Holmes) had another successful implementation.
The 2024 Winter Workshop (partially funded by Infotech) was jointly organized with the UF Department of Economics on causal inference and was a big success! Further details can be found in the story below.
Our Challis Lecturer this past fall was Eric TchetgenTchetgen, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Details can be found in the story below.
We also co-hosted ASA DataFest again: https://phhp.ufl.edu/2024/04/10/a-whirlwind-of-big-data-recapping-datafest-2024/
I look forward to hearing from you and let me know the next time you are in Gainesville.
Go Gators (and let’s hope the football team can survive their all-time difficult schedule this Fall).
Best regards,
Mike Daniels