Sung Duck Lee is a professor in the Department of Statistics and a Director of External Cooperation Affairs at Chungbuk National University in South Korea.

Chris Williams has been a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at the University of Idaho for about 15 years now. His webpage has links to courses he teaches, including SAS code for many statistical procedures. Chris married Dr. Celeste Brown (PhD in Genetics, UGA, 1989) 18 years ago, and their son Kyle Williams Brown is 12 and in the 7th grade.

Susan A. Baldwin is a Project Manager in the Information Technology Organization of Southern Company Services, Inc. - 26 years in June, 2007. Susan works in the corporate headquarters in downtown Atlanta and lives in Buckhead. She enjoys her family, friends and all that the big city has to offer. Her hobbies include: tennis, walking, concerts, art events, photography and fashion. She credits her Math background and Statistics/Computer Option degree (which included SAS programming among other computer programming courses) as a basis for great credentials for hiring on with Southern Company.

In 1993 Thomas J. Mason joined the graduate faculty at the College of Public Health, University of South Florida ( USF ). He served as the Chairperson of Epidemiology and Biostatistics for six years, and has served as the Director of the Global Center for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Action since 2000. He holds Joint Professorships in the Medical Ethics and Humanities and Global Emergency Medical Sciences in the Department of Internal Medicine, USF College of Medicine.

Walter Akins graduated in June of 1971 with a BS in Statistics. "I believe there were a total 6 Statistics Majors who graduated at that time. I worked for the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the College of Veterinary Medicine as a Wildlife Statistician until Feb of 1974. I earned a BS in Agricultural Mechanization Technology in 1979. I transferred to the Horticulture Department in Plant Sciences Building in 1974 and retired in January of 1995.

We are concerned with how to select significant variables in semi-parametric modeling. Variable selection for semi-parametric regression models consists of two components: model selection for nonparametric components and selection of significant variables for parametric portion. Thus, it is much more challenging than that for parametric models such as linear models and generalized linear models because traditional variable selection procedures including stepwise regression and the best subset selection require model selection to nonparametric components for each sub-model.

The use of economic and statistics principles have been instrumental in developing many quantitative methodologies in finance, for example the famous formula of Black-Scholes that led to a Noble Prize in economics. In order to research in mathematical finance, it is essential to understand both economic principles and the ever changing financial activities in the market.

The department is excited to host a reception at the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver, BC. The event will take place at 5:30 pm in the Convention Center room CC-4 (East) on Monday, August 2, 2010. If the JSM is in your travel plans, please make sure that you stop by at the reception!