The Department of Statistics was founded in 1955, following the establishment of the Statistical Laboratory by Jerzy Neyman in 1938. There are currently 25 permanent faculty members in the Department and about 50 graduate students.
The educational and research activities of the faculty and students span a broad range of topics in statistics and probability. Many faculty are actively involved in statistical problems that arise in such diverse fields as molecular biology, geophysics and planetary physics, AIDS, the US Census, neurophysiology, sociology, political science, education, and demography.
Examples of projects on a more theoretical level are the development of nonparametric and semiparametric methodology, the construction of optimal experimental designs, and the study of the bootstrap, asymptotic statistical decision theory, stochastic complexity, and optimality properties of wavelets.
The department has an active group in probability theory with interests in such areas as Markov processes, branching processes, fractalstructures, probabilistic algorithms, and Hausdorff measure. More examples and details are contained in the profiles of faculty interests.
Several faculty have joint appointments in other Departments: Biostatistics, Demography, Education, Mathematics, and Sociology. There are very close relations with the Biostatistics Department, with the students of each Department frequently taking courses in the other.
In addition to courses, there are opportunities to learn from weekly seminars, through statistical consulting via the Statistical Laboratory, through Summer Internships with institutions such as AT&T Bell Labs, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, Genentech, and Shering-Plough, and of course through informal contacts with faculty and other students in the Departmental offices, computer labs, and coffee room.
The Statistical Computing Facility reflects the central importance of a computationally intensive procedures in contemporary statistics. A professional staff maintains a network of Sun servers, workstations, and X-terminals that supports undergraduate and graduate education and research. Computation is integrated into instruction at all levels. Graduate students have access to essentially unlimited computer time and in fact they account for about 70% of computer usage.
The Statistics Graduate Student Association (SGSA) represents the interests of graduate students in Statistics and Biostatistics. It serves as a formal channel for communication between graduate students and faculty; officers of SGSA meet with the Department Chair and Department Committees to discuss topics of importance to students. SGSA also organizes several social events, including a picnic each semester, the daily coffee hour, and catering the Berkeley-Stanford colloquia. SGSA publishes Degrees of Freedom, a candid guide to the graduate program.
Last Modified: Oct 5, 1995