Dear Friends of UW Statistics,
As 2025 draws to a close, I am delighted to share a department update with you!
It has been another fantastic year for UW Statistics. This past June, we celebrated 41 BS, 39 MS and 13 PhD students who completed their degrees. The department’s graduation ceremony took place in the Husky Union Building’s Lyceum, and it was heartening to see our students and their families celebrating their well-deserved accomplishments. Then, this past September we welcomed 77 new BS students (33 of them frosh students directly admitted into the major), 24 MS students and 6 new PhD students. We are particularly excited about the recent growth of our undergraduate program after major curricular revisions that started in 2022, and thankful to Brent & Jill Smith for supporting this growth through two new scholarships!
On Friday, October 3 we held our annual faculty, student and staff dinner with the Department of Biostatistics at UW Center for Urban Horticulture. It was wonderful to see over 80 people across both departments attend the event and share in this tradition. Our links to the Biostatistics Department remain strong, and we are currently working together on various curricular initiatives that will help us remain among the top departments in the world in spite of the challenges that lie ahead.
This year’s Blackwell Seminar was held on Monday, October 20, and featured Moon Duchin, Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of Chicago, as the speaker. The title of her talk was "How to measure political representation." You can find more details here. The seminar featured prominently in this New York times profile of Professor Duchin's work.
This was a particularly successful year for our students, many of whom received important recognitions:
- Alex Jiang received a Best Student Paper Award from the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association
- Elvin Liu received an award from at USPROC.
- Shreya Prakash was selected to participate in 2025 Rising Stars Workshop
- Olivia McGough received a NSF GRFP award
- Bao Han Ngo was elected as a Husky 100
- Ronan Perry received an Amazon AI Ph.D. Fellowship
- Kayla Irish received an FDA-OCE-ASA Oncology Educational Fellowship.
- Keunwoo Lim received an Amazon Post Internship Fellowship
- Mateus Piovezan Otto won the poster competition at the SIAM Pacific Northwest Conference
- Ronak Mehta was selected for an oral presentation at the International Conference on Machine Learning
- Kayla Irish and Ethan Ancell received the Dorothy M. Gilford award, while Ronak Mehta and Yikun Zhang received the Z. W. Birnbaum award.
Thank you for being an integral part of the Stat@UW story. We look forward to sharing more milestones with you in 2025 and beyond.
Warmest wishes,
Abel Rodriguez