Statistics Associate Professor Veronica Berrocal was recently elected to a three-year term as chair of the Section in Environmental Sciences (EnviBayes) of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). EnviBayes promotes research and education in Bayesian methods in environmental sciences, organizing conferences and workshops and developing short courses for students and practitioners. It also encourages academics to work with environmental and public health organizations.
[Read more…]
The Department of Statistics has never known life without Rosemary Busta. Having helped build the department from the ground up, she has been here from the very beginning — even before that, in fact. Prior to taking on the new Statistics Department Manager role in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) back in 2002, she began her UCI career as an administrative assistant in the Department of Chemistry. Now, after more than 20 years of service at UCI, she is getting ready to retire.
[Read more…]College-level math is a big obstacle to graduation for many California students — and statistics is often the biggest roadblock within the curriculum.
Universities are revisiting a decades-old effort to improve the teaching of statistics by focusing introductory classes on concepts and showing how they apply in the real world before teaching the formulas that trip up many students.
Listen to the interview at KPCC.
In 2003, UC Irvine Statistics Professor Jessica Utts has been calling for statistics curriculum reform for decades. She was inspired, in part, by the college experiences of her mother and her sister.
“They had really opposite experiences,” she said. “My mother had a wonderful experience because it was taught by someone who knew what that particular group of people needed. Whereas my sister had a horrible experience. It was taught as a formula-based course. Like it was a math course.”
Read the full story at LAist.
The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences is pleased to introduce the following eight faculty who joined ICS in calendar year 2019. These outstanding researchers and educators advance our school’s strategic priorities in the areas of data science, artificial intelligence, and big data systems while strengthening our expanding collaborations across campus in the areas of health informatics and computational science and engineering. With these new hires, the number of tenure-track faculty in our school has increased by 40% within three years, bringing the total count to an all-time high of 93, and reflecting the unprecedented growth in our enrollments and research activity.
[Read more…]
For the past three years, Taneisha Arora has been double majoring in software engineering and data science, straddling all three departments in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). With software engineering being offered by the Department of Informatics jointly with the Department of Computer Science, and data science offered through the Department of Statistics, the double major supported her work at the intersection of machine learning and statistics. In addition to her studies, Arora volunteered for the AppJam+ program, mentoring middle school students on STEM concepts, and won a “Best Web App” hackathon award. Then, she spent the past summer in Boulder, Colorado, interning at Google. Now, as she starts her senior year, she decided to swap her software engineering major for a minor in ICS, allowing her more time to focus on her research and take classes that excite her.
Statistics Professor Babak Shahbaba is the principal investigator (PI) of a new three-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project, “Modulus: Data-Driven Mechanistic Modeling of Hierarchical Tissues,” brings together an interdisciplinary team of biologists, statisticians and mathematicians, including co-PIs Statistics Professor Vladimir Minin and Assistant Professor Angela Fleischman from the UCI School of Medicine. The goal is to develop a new mathematical framework that combines statistical and mechanistic models to help scientists discover emergent biological phenomena and to understand the rules that govern them.
[Read more…]
Dear colleagues,
On behalf of Chancellor Gillman, I am pleased to
announce that Hal S. Stern has been appointed vice provost for academic
planning, effective Sept. 1. Since joining UCI as founding chair of the
Department of Statistics in 2002, Professor Stern has held a range of
academic and administrative leadership roles. He served for eight years
as chair of statistics and then more than six years as the Ted and
Janice Smith Family Foundation Dean of the Donald Bren School of
Information and Computer Sciences. He is currently a Chancellor’s
Professor of statistics.
Statistics Professor Bin Nan, motivated by his collaborations in biomedical studies, is developing new theories and methods that will lead to more reliable results in high-dimensional statistical inference with potential applications in genetics and brain imaging studies. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded him $200,000 over three years for his grant, “High-Dimensional Inference beyond Linear Models.” The research is focused on finding ways to better address the bias issue for estimates in nonlinear models with a large number of predictors.
[Read more…]
In 2013, with a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), UCI established the Conte Center to explore how early-life experiences influence brain programming, which can in turn affect mental resilience or vulnerability. The original five-year award funded a series of projects focused on the connection between childhood adversity (in particular, fragmented and unpredictable signals from caretakers) and adolescent emotional and cognitive outcomes. The Conte Center includes two research cores — one for neuroimaging and one for biostatistics, computation and data management (BCDM) — that develop innovative methods and support the research projects.
[Read more…]