Latest news

Our department is one of the nation's fastest-growing Statistics programs. See the American Statistical Association interview with Prof. Ani Adhikari.

Kellie Ottoboni, first-year PhD student, won a 2015 Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship. From the site: "Microsoft Research recognizes these outstanding graduate students, who represent a selection of the best and the brightest in their fields."

Two former PhD students from the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics are among the recipients of this year's Sloan Research Fellowships. They are Jian Ding (PhD 2011, supervisors Elchanan Mossel and Yuval Peres) in Mathematics and Peter Ralph (PhD 2009, supervisor Steven Evans) in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology.

“Restoring Value to Minimum Variance,” by Lisa Goldberg, Ran Leshem, and Patrick Geddes, won a Special Distinction Award as part of the 2014 Markowitz Prize for the best papers appearing in the Journal of Investment Management. 

Professor Ben Recht won the 2015 William O. Baker award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Science for his contributions to Data Science.

Prof. Peter J. Bickel received a doctor honoris causa from ETH Zurich on 22 November 2014. The translation of the laudation (in German) reads "for fundamental contributions in semiparametric, robust and high-dimensional statistics, and for seminal influence in mathematical statistics and its applications."

Professor Deborah Nolan delivered the third biennial Pickard Memorial Lecture entitled "The Role of Data Science in Statistics Education" on October 24, 2014, at the Department of Statistics, Harvard University.

David Blackwell was selected by President Barack Obama to receive a posthumous National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for a scientist.

We invite applications for tenure-track level (Assistant Professor) positions in the areas of Probability and Statistics, with a start date of July 1, 2015. We will consider strong candidates in any area of Probability or Statistics (theoretical, applied, or computational).

See http://statistics.berkeley.edu/employment/faculty for details.

Professor Terry Speed wins the 2014 Australian Museum Eureka Prize.

Prof. Terry Speed won the 2014 Jerome Sacks award from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).

The award recognizes his "sustained, high-quality cross-disciplinary research involving the statistical sciences" and cites him as "a pioneer in the development and application of statistical methods for the analysis of biomedical and genomic data."

Just after 4pm on Wednesday August 6th, at the 2014 JSM in Boston, our colleague Martin Wainwright received the year’s COPSS Presidents’ Award, the most prestigious award for young researchers in our discipline.

"Michael Jordan, a leading UC Berkeley researcher in the fields of computer science and statistics, is the 2015 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize, a prestigious honor reserved for those who have made fundamental contributions to the theoretical foundations of human cognition."

Prof. Martin Wainwright has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). An induction ceremony took place July 8, 2014 at the IMS Annual Meeting in Sydney, Australia.

Professor Wainwright received the award for his fundamental research in statistical machine learning and high-dimensional statistics, specifically sparse modeling, graphical models, data compression and coding.

Former VIGRE Postdoc Emilia Huerta-Sanchez and her advisor, Rasmus Nielsen, have found a genetic link between Tibetans, Sherpas and an extinct race, the Denisovans. The gene enables its bearers to live at very high altitudes. "Sorting out obscure genetic evidence like this required intricate statistical calculations, and it was Huerta-Sánchez who did it," Nielsen said.

Spring 2014 courses supported by the cloud

A conference "Combinatorial Stochastic Processes" in celebration of Jim Pitman's work was held at U.C. San Diego, June 20-21 2014.

See http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Pitman_Conference/ for photos and slides from the talks.

The African American Faculty and Senior Staff Oral History Project has shared their interview of Professor David Blackwell, conducted by Nadine Wilmot in 2002 and 2003.

Lisa discusses the Monty Hall problem on Numberphile, a mathematical YouTube series produced by British filmmaker Brady Haran.  A follow-up video featuring Brady adds to the discussion.

Congratulations to Bin Yu on her election to the National Academy of Sciences!

NAS Press Release: http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/april-29-2014-NAS-Election.html