Chair's Letter

Dear Friends of UW Statistics, 

I reach out to you as we celebrate the end of another academic year and the start of a beautiful summer in Seattle. 2022-2023 was another academic year full of successes and I continue to be proud of serving as the Chair of a department with such fantastic faculty, students and staff.  

I would like to start this newsletter by reporting on our graduation celebration, where we recognized the accomplishments of 45 B.S., 44 M.S. and 15 Ph.D. students this past June 9th. The ceremony featured reflections from our PhD alumna Larissa Stanberry (Ph.D., 2008) and three graduating students: Suh Young Choi (graduating from our B.S. program), Dongyang Wang (graduating from our M.S. program), and Anupreet Porwal (graduating from our Ph.D. program).  You can watch a recording of the ceremony in our YouTube channel at https://stat.uw.edu/graduation.  I am also very proud to report that the department will be welcoming 40 new B.S., 37 new M.S. and 10 new Ph.D. students in Autumn 2023.  We are very excited to welcome this new group into our community! 

This year we will be resuming our annual alumni reception at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto, jointly with the Biostatistics department.  It will be held between 5:00 and 7:00 pm on Monday, August 7 at The Firkin Flatiron pub.  This will be the first time the joint reception is being held since I joined UW in the summer of 2020 and I am looking forward to the opportunity of talking to everyone there! 

The department remains committed to its goal of creating a strong, diverse and inclusive community. As part of this commitment, we have joined a group of 8 other UW academic departments to put forward a proposal to the Sloan Foundation to establish a Sloan Center for Systemic Change at the UW.  While this is a multistep process and we are early in the application process, I am confident that, independently of whether we are funded, our engagement in this initiative will lead to positive change in our department and the institution as a whole. 
Finally, I am very happy to report that the changes to the undergraduate program that the department approved in Spring 2022 have been approved by the campus.  We expect that the changes will apply to students admitted for the 2024-2025 academic year. 

I wish you all a great summer! 

Abel Rodriguez