Publications and More
by Professor John Walker
The 2010-2011 academic year was a very busy one for me. My statistical consulting work with faculty from other departments produced two publications. I coauthored one paper on the heat stability of skimmed milk in the Journal of Dairy Science with Dr. Phil Tong and Dr. Vandna Sikand of the Dairy Products Technology Center. Another paper I coauthored, this time with Dr. Steven Kane of the School of Education, focused on detecting attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities in college students. It appeared in the Journal of Learning Disabilities. I will be working on more projects with all of these coauthors this summer.
In the past year, I’ve worked with two graduate students on their masters’ theses: one in Dairy Science involving study of mineral content in milk, and another in Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Administration studying the attitudes of Morro Bay residents towards tourism. I also helped two undergraduate biology students on their senior project which examines the association between moonlight and the nesting frequency of endangered sea turtles in Guatemala. Their data also served as the basis of one project for our STAT 465 Statistical Consulting class. I will be working with these students and Dr. Emily Taylor from the Biology Department this summer to refine our results and write a paper.
In June, I graded AP Statistics exams for the second year in a row. This year about 600 high school and college statistics instructors graded over 140,000 exams over the course of one week in Daytona Beach, Fla. (That may not sound like fun, but it has its moments, and it’s very important to all of those students who took the exam!) I was one of eight Cal Poly faculty there. Afterwards, I spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center and saw the Space Shuttle Atlantis sitting on the launch pad awaiting the final flight of the Space Shuttle program.
At the end of the year, I found out that I had been promoted from associate professor to professor. It’s nice to be recognized by my colleagues, and I feel very thankful to be part of the Cal Poly Statistics Department. Next year, I will continue my research and consulting work, and I look forward for the first time to teaching our STAT 423 Advanced Design of Experiments course.
