Fall 2009 Alumni Workshop
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STATSTA NEWS September 2009 Volume 14 Message from the Department Head Jim Rosenberger returned in the Spring as the keynote speaker for our annual Acting Department Head, Fall 2009 Alumni Workshop. She has been working at Rand Greetings from the Corporation since graduation and is currently also a visiting Department of Statistics this scholar at the Peabody College of Education, at Vanderbilt Fall! We invite you to enjoy the University. As the network of past, present and future news of happenings here in Happy faculty and staff members and students grows, we want to Valley about our faculty and keep these connections alive. We are planning to write a students. Read about the multiple history of the department and publish a dynamic version on successes of our faculty reported in our web site. Stay tuned for a request for photos and these pages, and the many poster updates from when you were in the department, and links to sessions and contributed papers presented by our graduate the present. students. I am acting department head this Fall semester, to allow Of equal interest is the News from our alumni who Bruce Lindsay to accept the Distinguished Visitor Award at return for special occasions. Mark Becker, 1985 Ph.D., the Department of Statistics, University of Auckland, in received the Outstanding Science Alumni Award this Fall New Zealand. He and Laura Simon were enjoying the from the Eberly College of Science. His latest achievement coming of spring down under as an early winter covered was being installed as the 7th president of the Georgia State Centre County with a 100-year record snowfall in mid University this Fall. Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, 1999 Ph.D., October. Bruce Lindsay Department Head INSIDE this issue Greetings from Down Under! (I mean the equator, not Jim) Outreach 2 Faculty News 3 It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to thank Jim Alumni News 14 Rosenberger publicly for his service as Department Head Student News 16 this fall semester. It is also a pleasure to introduce Personal Corner 20 you to the many things the Department has accomplished Contributions 21 over the last 12 months. For this I also give thanks to Coming Attractions 22 Barbara Freed for her fine editorial work. I think that after reading this edition of STAT NEWS you will agree with me that "All is well in Happy Valley!" Department of Statistics The Pennsylvania State University 326 Thomas Building, University Park, PA 16802 Tel (814) 865-1348 Fax (814) 863-7114 www.stat.psu.edu Newsletter 1 From the Director of Outreach in the Department of Statistics On June 30, 2009 we announced the opening of our Master of Applied Statistics (MAS) for online students and began accepting applications. The MAS Online program is a natural sequel to the Certificate in Applied Statistics which we have been offering to online students since 2006, and requires the completion of 12 credits. We marked this milestone in our online development by sponsoring a booth at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, D.C. in August to get the information out to statisticians in industry and government. We hoped they would recommend it to their colleagues who could benefit from additional continuing education in applied statistics. We are also planning to have a display booth at the ENAR meetings in New Orleans in March 2010. The Online MAS program requires 30 credits and provides the same set of potential students the opportunity to complete a degree without leaving their current places of employment. Why are we committed to putting our MAS program online? The answer, in the title of the August 5, 2009 New York Times article: “For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics,” says it best, as we stated on our recent NSF grant request seeking funds to provide scholarships for MAS students. The workforce demand for those with advanced skills in statistics spans government, academia and industry. The Business, Industry, and Government 2007 Salary Survey identifies a wide range (more than 15 categories) of employers, from pharmaceutical and computer software companies to those within local, state, and federal governments and those emphasizing the rapid changing pace of communications. Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Milken Institute, an independent economic think tank, SmartMoney magazine recently published an article citing top college majors linked to growing industries. Statistics has been identified as one of five majors that are closely tied to growing industries. Growth in the Certificate Program: In the 2008/09 academic year, seven (7) students have completed the Certificate program so far and received their certificates, compared to twenty (20) in the 2007/08 academic year. Interest in the Certificate program continues to grow. We expect these numbers to plateau, as we emphasize on our admission web page, with information about the requirements needed for students with the appropriate prerequisites and ability to successfully complete the program. The number of new applications in 2008/09 was 245 compared to 151 in 2007/08, a 62% increase. However, more important was the enrollment in our online classes, which totaled 455 students in 2008/09, versus 350 in 2007/08, a 30% increase. Regardless of the numbers, our commitment to this program stems from the impression we have from these students that making these applied statistics courses available online serves an important need for upgrading the skills of workers who are finding ever increasing challenges for converting data to knowledge and the recognition that statistical methods provide powerful tools for accomplishing these tasks. It has been an important part of our educational and service mission to provide access to our courses for students not only at Penn State, but to citizens of Pennsylvania, the USA and the world. The mode of delivery through the online World Campus has opened this opportunity to a much larger audience, by removing the geographical barrier of location. Indeed the temporal barrier of time has been reduced, since our courses are all offered in a synchronous format, which allows the students to access the material anytime during the day, and most deadlines operate on a weekly schedule. - James L. Rosenberger (Phone: 814 865-1340; email: [email protected]) Newsletter 2 FACULTY NEWS New Faculty Dennis Lin Professor of Statistics Dennis Lin's research focuses on statistical methodologies related to business, industry, and government. In particular, much of his work has been in the area of data mining; experimental design; quality assurance, including Six Sigma, a particular quality assurance method; statistical process control; reliability; and response-surface methodology, a technique for examining the relationships between explanatory and response variables and subsequently optimizing the response variables. Lin also uses supersaturated design, which allows him to investigate many variables using a relatively small number of experimental runs, and Kalman filter, a tool used in engineering applications ranging from radar to computer vision. To do his work, Lin makes use of statistical tools, such as statistical modeling, number theory, Bayesian inference, optimal-design theory, optimization, and time-series analysis. He currently is devoting much of his time to working on problems related to radio frequency identification (RFID) and Internet search engines. Prior to becoming a professor in the Department of Statistics in Penn State's Eberly College of Science in fall 2009, Lin was, and will remain until June 2010, the University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain and Statistics in Penn State's Smeal College of Business beginning in 2005. He previously had been a professor of management science and statistics from 1998 to 2004 and an associate professor of management science and statistics from 1995 to 1998. Lin was an associate professor at the University of Tennessee from 1993 to 1995, a visiting scientist at the IBM Watson Research Center from 1993 to 1994, and an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee from 1989 to 1993. Lin earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan in 1981 and a Ph.D. degree in statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. Lin has won numerous honors and awards, including a Faculty Scholar Medal from Penn State in 2004 and the Mercator Visiting Professorship Award from the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) program in 2008. He was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998, a Fellow of the American Society for Quality in 2006, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute in 1995, and a Fellow of The Royal Statistical Society in 1993. In 2008, he was named the Chang-Jiang Scholar at the Renmin University of China by the Chinese government's Department of Education. Lin is the author of nearly 150 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and of several book chapters. He holds two patents, and he has presented talks at numerous conferences worldwide. He currently is a co-editor of the journal Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry and an associate editor of various top-ranked journals, including Technometrics, Statistica Sinica, Journal of Quality Technology, Journal of Data Science, Journal of Statistics and Its Applications, and Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice. Lin is an Honorary Chair Professor at various universities, including the National Chengchi University and the National Sun Yet- Sen University in Taiwan, and Fudan University, the XiAn Statistical Institute, and Renmin University in China. Newsletter 3 Faculty Highlights Infectious Disease Dynamics is at Naomi Altman Named http://www.cidd.psu.edu/ of Georgia, Resources for the Future Fellow of the and the World Health Organization. American Statistical Bryan Grenfell, Penn State alumni Murali Haran wins Association professor of biology, is one of two New Researcher's In 2009, Naomi Altman has been co-principal investigators named in Award to attend named a Fellow of the American the grant.