Statistics and Data Science at UMass

A Statistics and Data Science analysis chart.
February 9, 2024

Some of the many things that happened in the last year

  • Three new faculty joined the statistics group: Associate Professor Lulu Kang, Assistant Professor Carlos Soto, and Assistant Professor Qian Zhao. Assistant Professor Weiqi Chu joined the applied math group, and Nathan Wycoff will join the statistics group as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2024!
  • In the 2022-2023 academic year, 89 students graduated with a concentration in Statistics and Data Science, 15 students graduated from the Statistics MS program, and 2 students graduated from the Statistics PhD program.
  • Adira Cohen, a UMass CS and Math double major was awarded the Five College Statistics Prize. She is now a PhD student in Statistics at North Carolina State University.
  • Statistical Consulting and Collaboration Services, directed by Professors Krista J Gile and Anna Liu, aided approximately twenty clients from departments including Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Neuroscience, Biology and Microbiology, Kinesiology, Linguistics, and Food Sciences.
  • Assistant Professor Maryclare Griffin’s paper Structured Shrinkage Priors, coauthored with Professor Peter Hoff and published in Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics in 2023, was selected for the American Statistical Association Editor’s Choice Collection.
  • Professor John Staudenmayer and collaborators at the University at California, San Diego, received a four year, $738K NIH grant: "Leveraging deep learning to classify sitting posture and measure sedentary patterns from accelerometer data in diverse cohorts”.
  • Assistant Professor Ted Westling and collaborators in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at UMass Amherst received a five year, $437K NIH grant: "Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in At-Risk Hispanic Women following Pregnancy Complications”.
  • UMass professors organized five invited sessions at the New England Statistical Symposium 2023 at Boston University and two sessions at the Joint Statistical Meetings 2023 in Toronto.
  • The weekly Statistics and Data Science seminar series hosted local, national, and international seminar speakers.