Colorado State University

The Department of Statistics is searching for two assistant professors starting in the fall of 2024:

1. A tenure-track Assistant Professor. Applicants in all areas of statistics are encouraged to apply. See additional information and instructions here.
2. A non-tenure-track Assistant Professor with a focus on teaching. We are particularly interested in individuals who can teach master’s classes on a variety of applied statistics topics. See additional information and instructions here.

Graduate student Lane Drew received the 2024 Thomas A. Jones Graduate Fellowship from the College of Natural Sciences. The fellowship recognizes graduate students in any program in the College of Natural Sciences that develop advanced quantitative tools to advance research in applied interdisciplinary areas such as ecology, evolutionary biology, or genomics. Lane’s research focuses on developing statistical modeling approaches for applications in tree demography. The work develops computational and Bayesian methods for complex record linkage and spatial data. His research is supervised by Professor Andee Kaplan.

Graduate student Troy Wixson received an honorable mention in the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment student paper competition. Wixson presented his work in a special session at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Portland, OR in August. His paper is titled “Attribution of Seasonal Wildfire Risk to Changes in Climate: A Statistical Extremes Approach” and is joint work with his advisor Professor Daniel Cooley.
Professor Ander Wilson received the Early Investigator Award from the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment at JSM. The award recognizes his contributions to advancements in methodology for the analysis of environmental health data.

Statistics professor Aaron Nielsen has earned a BA in Philosophy—his sixth degree to date. The Fort Collins High School valedictorian first attended CSU, where he earned degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics. Professor Nielsen went on to earn a graduate degree in electrical engineering at CU. He then secured a job with a defense contractor in Denver, then returned to CSU to complete two degrees in statistics. Now, he has completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at CSU. You can read more about his story here.

This summer 14 Statistics and Data Science undergraduates gained valuable experience by participating in research projects.  These paid positions are sponsored by the College of Natural Sciences, the Statistics department and the Data Science program.  Students were supervised by faculty members Yawen Guan, Ann Hess, Dongzhou Huang, Kayleigh Keller, Aaron Nielsen, Ben Prytherch, Ben Shaby, Tianying Wang, Yunpeng Zhao and Tianjian Zhou.  Application areas included fire conditions in the Western US, football analytics, statistical learning in cancer genomics, quantum computing and homeless outreach in Fort Collins.  Students presented their work to the department on June 28.  This is the third year the department has offered this popular program.  Eight participating students from summer 2023 presented at Celebrate Undergraduate Research and Creativity (CURC) on April 18.

June 2024: Piotr Kokoszka has been awarded a 36 month Statistics program grant for the project “Monitoring time series in structured function spaces.” The project aims to develop new mathematical theory and statistical tools that will enable monitoring for changes in complex systems, for example in spatio-temporal patterns of infectious diseases, financial asset portfolios, or global trade networks. It will develop statistical methods for  making decisions about an emergence of an atypical pattern in a complex system in real time and with statistical guarantees of a correct decision. The project will also offer multiple interdisciplinary training opportunities for the next generation of statisticians and data scientists, and will include collaborations with economists in the United Kingdom.