Message from Department Chair Allan Rossman
Bob Smidt passing on the baton to Allan Rossman
I am proud to begin a term as chair of Cal Poly’s Statistics Department. We have a terrific group of students and faculty to work and study alongside. I want to thank my predecessor, Bob Smidt, and the others who have served in this role over the years — Jay Devore, Roxy Peck and Jim Daly — for paving the way and establishing such a delightful environment in which to teach, study and learn.
This is an especially exciting time to be involved with the discipline of statistics for many reasons:
- We are nearing the end of a yearlong celebration of 2013 as the International Year of Statistics.
- Nate Silver has garnered popular acclaim for the usefulness of statistical methods by predicting the last two presidential elections very accurately while blogging about his modeling process and observations.
- Hans Rosling has achieved worldwide recognition for his TED talks and The Joy of Stats video that reveal how statistics can improve human welfare.
- The Wall Street Journal published an article titled Data Crunchers Now the Cool Kids on Campus on March 1, 2013, detailing the explosive growth in the number of undergraduates pursuing degrees in statistics.
Statistics students at Cal Poly have long known that they were the cool kids on campus, but it’s nice to see a major newspaper broadcast this news to the rest of the world.
One of the most pleasant aspects of being department chair has been hearing updates from alumni about their career paths and accomplishments. I wrote to as many graduates as I could find contact information for on LinkedIn and Facebook, and I was gratified to hear back from dozens of alums whose updates you can read in this newsletter. Simply perusing the job titles of our graduates is inspiring. I hope that others will judge the quality of our program by the achievements of our graduates.
Let me highlight the accomplishments of one alumnus in particular. Dr. Greg Ridgway serves as the acting director of the National Institute of Justice, which is the research, development, and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. Greg graduated from Cal Poly in 1995 with a degree in statistics and then earned a doctorate from the University of Washington. He also received the distinction of being elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2013. You can read more about Greg elsewhere in this newsletter.
Our terrific faculty members also contribute to the top-notch quality of Cal Poly’s Statistics Department and are held in high esteem across campus and around the country:
- Beth Chance served on a National Science Foundation task force that offered recommendations for restructuring NSF funding opportunities in statistical sciences. She is also a member of a group assembled by the American Statistical Association to revise guidelines for undergraduate programs in statistics.
- Steve Rein serves as chair of Cal Poly’s Academic Senate, and Andrew Schaffner continues as chair of the senate's curriculum committee. These are important positions on campus, entrusted to those in whom the rest of the faculty has high confidence.
- Samuel Frame recently earned tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor, based on thorough department-, college- and university-level reviews of his performance in teaching, scholarship, and service.
Andrew and Samuel are both graduates of our program as well as faculty members.
We have also been fortunate in the past couple of years to hire outstanding new faculty members who are starting to make their mark on Cal Poly students. Kevin Ross, Gail Potter, Gary Hughes and Peter Chi all joined our department in the 2012-13 academic year. You can read about some of Gary’s research interests elsewhere in this newsletter.
Before I close, I want to assure you that we are committed not only to maintaining a strong undergraduate program in statistics but also to continually improving our program. This year we are engaging in wide-ranging discussions and planning about how to better prepare our students to make important contributions to a world that is becoming more and more inundated with data. We are planning to revise some courses and develop new ones. We are also collaborating with colleagues in computer science to develop a new minor program in data science.
We would like to hear from all of you, graduates and friends of the Cal Poly Statistics Department. Please send us any ideas you have about how we can best serve our students. Also please send us an update about what and how you are doing, both professional accomplishments and personal joys.
Best wishes,
Allan Rossman
