Letter from the Chair: 2026
Dear Statistics Alumni and Friends,
With the conclusion of the academic year on the Central Coast, I have a lot of good news to share, and one personal announcement to make at the end. But first, the department.
This year brought one of our most exciting curriculum milestones in recent memory. After years of collaborative work across departments, the Academic Senate approved a new Bachelor of Science degree in Data Science, a joint program with Computer Science and Mathematics anticipated to launch in Fall 2027. The program reflects something we've long believed: that the future of data science education lives at the intersection of disciplines, and that the Statistics Department sits at the center of it all.
Our third annual DataFest competition was our most successful yet, and the numbers tell the story: roughly 140 students participated this year, a figure that has approximately doubled year over year since we launched the event. Emily Robinson led a terrific team of student volunteers, faculty, and guest judges through the 48-hour challenge, with students from Cal Poly, CSU Monterey Bay, and UC Santa Barbara diving into a real-world dataset, collaborating under pressure, and presenting findings to industry professionals. If you're interested in serving as a judge in a future year, you can sign up at earobinson95.github.io/calpoly-datafest/judges.html.
Student travel this year was something to be proud of as well. We sent seven students to the Joint Statistical Meetings in August, three to the Posit conference, three to USCOTS, and one to SDSS. These experiences, where students present their work and connect with the broader statistics community, matter enormously for their professional development. None of it happens without your financial support, and we're grateful.
We're also proud to have conferred degrees on 57 students earning a Bachelor of Science in statistics and 14 earning a Master of Science degree this year — a reflection of the program's continued strength and the hard work of our students and faculty.
Our faculty continued to advance the field through their research this year. Charlotte Mann published work on combining observational and experimental data for causal inference while preserving data privacy in the Journal of Causal Inference; Emily Robinson explored how people perceive logarithmic scales in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics; and Trevor Ruiz contributed new methods for sparse estimation in time series analysis to the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. Julia Schedler co-authored work on citywide wastewater surveillance modeling, published in Data Science in Science. On the teaching and learning side — an area where our department has long led — Beth Chance, Karen McGaughey, and Soma Roy contributed to a multi-institutional study on simulation-based inference (notably, with two students as co-authors) in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, joined by Allison Theobold and Zoe Rehnberg, whose paper on inclusive teaching practices through student data projects appeared in the same journal.
We're also proud to welcome three outstanding new colleagues. Ethan Marzban joins us from UC Santa Barbara, where his doctoral work developed Bayesian approaches to nonparametric regression and where he earned a reputation as a teacher whom students don't forget, including a nomination for an excellence in teaching award. Katie Herder comes from the University of Arizona's Biostatistics program, bringing expertise in Bayesian hierarchical models and a hands-on teaching philosophy that fits naturally with Cal Poly's learn-by-doing culture. And Connor Celum, who completed his doctorate at the University of Virginia and has been working in clinical trial design at Eli Lilly, brings real industry depth alongside a genuine enthusiasm for making statistics accessible to every kind of student. We're lucky to have all three.
At the same time, we say farewell to Hunter Glanz. A Cal Poly Statistics alum who joined our faculty in 2014 and was promoted to full professor this past fall, Hunter was a driving force behind our cross-disciplinary data science program and a colleague who brought creativity and care to everything he touched. He's heading to North Carolina State to join their Institute for Advanced Analytics, and while we're genuinely proud of him, we'll miss him.
Finally, a personal note. I'm delighted to share that Karen McGaughey will be taking over as department chair in July. Karen is an active scholar in statistics education and has served as chair of our curriculum committee, guiding us through the massive quarter-to-semester conversion — no small feat. I couldn't imagine the department in better hands. (And on that note: this is the last newsletter you'll receive written related to the quarter system. No more quarters!) As for me, I'll be stepping into a new role as associate dean of operations in the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences, just across campus. It has been a privilege and a joy to serve as the Statistics Department chair, and I look forward to staying close to this community in a new way.
Thank you, as always, for your connection to this department and your generosity toward our students. It means more than we can say.
Warm regards,
Andrew Schaffner
Professor and Chair
Department of Statistics
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
