Faculty Updates 2015
Matt Carlton
In the last year, I've traveled to Flagstaff, Ariz., in the summer (too warm!) and Maryland in March (too cold!). Hopefully, the Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle, Wash., this August will be just right. My textbook in applied probability has been published, and we're using it for both STAT 325 and STAT 350. I'm also told that the book is one of the favorite toys of Dr. Ross' baby daughter.
Beth Chance
Professionally, I had fun in the fall learning about and incorporating new (to me) topics like Lasso and CART in STAT 324. I am sad that I will not be at the AP Reading this spring for the first time in many, many years, but at least I get to go to graduation. Personally, I continue to play volleyball and do some running. I was impressed by all the alumni who listed having recently run half marathons — keep it up! I set a personal best for the City to Sea half in the fall, but sadly, my cell phone app provides strong evidence that the course was short. Let me know if you want to come for the grand fifth anniversary of the San Luis Obispo half/full in 2016.
Peter Chi
It has been a great couple of years at Cal Poly, but I will be taking a leave of absence after this year so that my wife can attend graduate school at Villanova University just outside of Philadelphia. I was able to obtain another teaching position at a small liberal arts college in that area called Ursinus College. Regardless of whether we are ultimately able to come back or not, I hope to stay in touch with all of you — we will miss you all, both professionally and personally.
Jimmy Doi
I have now been with the department for twelve years, and this term I have been fortunate to become a full professor. Last August, a paper I co-wrote on the topic of binomial confidence intervals appeared in The American Statistician. Currently, I am finishing up a paper (along with colleagues Peter Chi and Gail Potter and statistics majors Jimmy Wong and Irvin Alcaraz) on the topic of Shiny Apps, and this will be submitted soon. The best news, however, in the past year was the arrival of our second daughter, Stephanie! It's been a hectic but fun-filled year.
Samuel Frame
During fall 2014, I took a leave of absence and worked for Wells Fargo as an advanced analytics consultant in Charlotte, N.C. I was responsible for developing and documenting a model used for loss forecasting and stress testing of a large portfolio. The model was ultimately examined and approved by the Federal Reserve!
Gary Hughes
The Cal Poly summer research program sponsored several interesting projects this year. For one of the projects, we outfitted an astronomical telescope with a long-wave infrared camera. After testing the system on campus, we moved to White Mountain Research Center’s Barcroft Station, at 13,000 feet elevation. Teams of students operated the telescope at Barcroft Station during the month of August 2014. We recorded two terabytes of digital infrared video data, including four hours per day of lunar surface video and many hours of atmospheric surveillance. Early efforts at analyzing the data have identified numerous atmospheric meteor trails and some spectacular sequences of changes in lunar surface temperatures through the month. Data analysis is continuing, and we plan to boost some intensive operations by using the Cal Poly physics cluster. We plan to continue data acquisition this summer, both with the telescope and in several new scenarios.
Ulric Lund
I enjoyed working with two great students on their senior projects this year (you know who you are). I'm continuing my collaboration with a forestry professor studying the growth of Monterey pines. I also enjoyed working with my colleagues earlier this year thinking about how to update our statistics major curriculum in terms of computing.
Karen McGaughey
This year has been a busy one for me. I've taken on the role of the Statistics Department curriculum chair, which means more involvement in the conversations and decisions about updates and changes to our curriculum. With the 2017-19 catalog, we hope to introduce some new courses and update old courses to keep Cal Poly Statistics one of the best undergraduate programs in the country. On a personal note, I spent last summer traveling to exotic locations like Flagstaff, Ariz., for the International Conference on Teaching Statistics and Boston, Mass., for the Joint Statistical Meetings, and I got married in October!
Becky Ottesen
I still enjoy the best of both worlds teaching part-time at Cal Poly and working as a biostatistician for the City of Hope (COH). This year has been busier than ever as I am finishing up a companion book of exercises and projects to accompany The Little SAS Book. My work at COH has expanded into the new frontier of analytics — I've been working with unstructured text-based data and natural language processing. On the home front, my kids are growing up fast, and we are all counting the days until summer vacation.
Kevin Ross
I continue to enjoy teaching at Cal Poly. I've adopted a simulation-based approach to inference in many of my courses. I've also added a few new jokes to my repertoire. I recently attended DataFest at UCLA and ate a lot of candy while our Cal Poly teams worked around the clock analyzing a large, complex data set. Outside of work, I love spending time with my family enjoying all the natural beauty this area has to offer.
Allan Rossman
Last year, I completed a five-year term as chief reader for the AP Statistics exam, in which capacity Beth Chance and I supervised the grading of about 750,000 exams over five years. Later this month, I'm looking forward to the U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics, for which I am serving as program chair for the second time. On the personal side, my wife Eileen and I said goodbye to our 23-year-old cat Eponine last summer, and we continue to enjoy our cat Puti every day. We've traveled to Maui, Macchu Pichu and Havasu Falls in the past year, and we're planning for a cruise on the Nile River in Egypt this summer.
Steve Rein
In the last year, I stepped down from being chair of the Academic Senate at Cal Poly. This means more time in the classroom, which is refreshing and great fun. In other matters, my oldest daughter is a theater arts sophomore at Cal Poly, and my oldest son has just chosen to go to the University of Richmond in Richmond, Va., where we lived before moving to Cal Poly. We'll see about the last two ...
Soma Roy
This past year has been a very eventful one for me. Teaching has been great, with many opportunities to work with great Cal Poly students in classes and on various projects. Research collaborations with colleagues in statistics and other departments have been very fruitful. Also, I received tenure and was promoted to associate professor. Most recently, I was appointed to be editor for the Journal of Statistics Education, 2016-18. I am excited about what I will learn through this experience. On a personal note, I got married and my husband (Morgan Sherman, associate professor, mathematics) and I bought a house! We are looking forward to working on it over the next few years to add our personal touches to it.
Andrew Schaffner
Together with friends in the Computer Science (Alex Dekhtyar) and Physics (Brian Granger) Departments and others in the Statistics Department (Hunter Glanz, Gary Hughes and Samuel Frame), I've had the pleasure of playing a key role in developing our new cross-disciplinary studies minor in data science, which will begin next fall. To prepare for teaching new courses, I'm learning Python and generally trying to stay current with the ever-changing, vaguely-defined and exploding field of data science. This spring, I'm also having a lot of fun teaching consulting for the first time (with Heather Smith), and I'm finally stepping down as chair of the Academic Senate Curriculum Committee to allow for more time for all the learning I need to do to prep for these new courses. It's fun to be a student again. Hooray for lifelong learning!
Jeffrey Sklar
I am wrapping up my tenth year at Cal Poly, and I continue to stay busy with teaching and research. One of my current projects, sponsored by the Office of Academic Programs and Planning, is to examine student factors associated with the risk of changing majors over time using survival analysis methods. The results will be presented at the annual conference for the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) in Las Vegas this October. It’s also hard to believe how fast my kids are growing up. Yazmin (5 years old) is evolving into a true artist and will begin kindergarten in the fall. Gabriel (3 years old) constantly amazes me with his athleticism and rides a bike faster than most kids twice his age.
Bob Smidt
My wife and I have done a lot of traveling since we retired. Our most recent trips have been to Australia to visit my son, Jesse, who was spending a year there; to Arizona to visit and golf with a former visiting faculty member, Dennis O’Brien; to New York City to spend a Christmas and New Year’s holiday with my sister and her family; and to Ireland to try not to crash when driving down the left side of the road in a left-handed manual transmission rental car. I continue to conduct advanced statistics workshops in places like Houston, Texas; Raleigh, N.C.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Northfield, Minn. (site of the famous Jesse James gang shoot-out) and to travel to Kansas City with several other faculty members to grade the AP Statistics exam. I teach part-time in the fall and winter quarters. I still play racquetball and golf, where I have managed to lower my index to 31.5 (if you know anything about golf, you know how bad I am).
Heather Smith
I continue to enjoy the many statistics students I get to know in STAT 421 and STAT 465. This year, we served three different clients in STAT 421 and for the first time we are conducting two sections of STAT 465 (that means eight clients). Consulting is as busy as ever, and the department may expand our services a bit. Personally, my children and husband are great. This summer, I plan to visit Dublin, Ireland; Kauai, Hawaii, and Seattle, Wash. While in Seattle, I will again teach a short course at the Joint Statistical Meetings on statistical communication. Maybe you would like to sign up?
John Walker
Last year, I taught STAT 465 for the seventh time, which is always a pleasure. Outside of teaching, I've done a lot of work on Statistics Department and university curriculum as well as statistical consulting. My recent consulting projects include work in dairy science and biotechnology.
