Statistics Newsletter – Spring 2021
Haonan Wang on the Oval

In 2021, we are celebrating multiple milestones of the department. Sixty years ago, Frank Graybill established the Statistical Laboratory, which now bears his name. In the same year, the statistics Ph.D. program was approved. Fifty years ago, the Department of Statistics split off from mathematics, and Frank Graybill served as the first department chair.

Last fall, we welcomed two new faculty members to the Rams family and four new associate professors. This spring, Professor Jana Anderson will retire after more than 20 years of great service in the department and more than 30 years at Colorado State University. Jana is the director of the Master of Applied Statistics program. Thanks to her efforts, this program is now ranked among the top online master’s programs in statistics. I wish Jana a happy retirement and thank her for the great contribution to the department.

Spring is also the time to celebrate graduations of our undergraduate and graduate students, which mark a new episode of their life’s journey. I would like to use this opportunity to congratulate every student on their achievements.

At the end of this unusual academic year, I would like to thank all faculty and teaching assistants, as well as our administrative staff, for their enormous efforts to ensure that the teaching and research missions of the department successfully continued in the time of the pandemic.

Sincerely,

Haonan Wang

Chair

Department Highlights

50th anniversary of department/Ph.D. program; 60th anniversary of Stat Lab

This year, the Colorado State University Department of Statistics is celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is also the 60th anniversary of its Ph.D. program and the Franklin A. Graybill Statistics and Data Science Laboratory – marking six decades of world-class education, research, service, and interdisciplinary support of the CSU community through powerful application of foundational science.

Graduate Student Spotlight: Lucy Lu

In her first years at CSU, Lu developed a framework that combines methods from applied mathematics and computer science to fuse mechanistic partial differential equations with statistical models in a big data setting.

Matt Koslovsky Develops Novel Methods for Analyzing Microbiome Data

Human microbiome research seeks to better understand the role of our microbial communities and how they interact with their host, respond to their environment, and influence disease.

Department News

Introducing STAT 100: Statistical Literacy

Statistics Newsletter – Spring 2021

Although still in its infancy, data suggest STAT 100 has been successful at serving students for whom the quantitative reasoning requirement is a barrier to graduation, with completion rates ranging from 92% to 100%.

Statistics Newsletter – Spring 2021

New Working Groups Generate Research Momentum

Even though the pandemic thwarted many activities in the fall, three new working groups in the Department of Statistics generated research excitement in the areas of environmental biostatistics, data science, and SAS programming.

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