Dr. Jennifer Kaplan and Department of Statistics PhD Student, Kristen Roland were featured in the August 2016 edition of the Innovation Gateway Newsletter. This monthly e-newsletter was started in 2015 to share the latest news from UGA's Innovation Gateway and to highlight faculty participating in UGA's mission to move new discoveries into the marketplace. Way to go Dr. Kaplan and Kristen on promoting the Department of Statistics!  

Please read an exciting discussion with 1996 ASA President, Lynne Billard, which appeared in the July 2016 issue of AMSTAT News. Congratulations, Lynne! 

Congratulations to all our students this year on their excellent acheivments within the department! Andrew Mullins was selected as the best MS Student, Chul Moon and Xinliang Zhang tied for the best beginning PhD student, and Fei Liu was selected as best Senior Student. We are so incredibly proud of all our winners. Congratulations again! 

Congratulations to our four statistics students who won the Outstanding TA Award. Alexei Ionan, Arunava Samaddar, Vineet Vora, and Chuck Wang all go above and beyond the duties of a TA to help and encourage all the students who they come in contact with. This is a University award, given to students who are in compliance with the University TA Policy and who are amont the best 10% of TAs at The University of Georgia. Congratulations again to these four outstanding TAs! 

Statistics students Xianyan Chen, Xiaodong Jiang, Jerry Shi, and Yang Song were one of the five finalist teams in teh Capital One Contest. The team members, along with advisor, Jaxk Reeves, were invited to Capital One headquarters from April 20-22, 2016. Here, they presented their analysis and were named first place winners in the competition! Congratulations to these students and Dr. Jaxk Reeves for this great achievemnet! 

Alumni News

Alumni of the Department of Statistics at UGA are going places! Check here to see updates on your former classmates and friends. If you would like your update included in our Alumni News section, please complete the Alumni Update Form.

Forrest (Roy) Wilkes has been awarded a Summer 2026 CURO Research Award to pursue research in Bayesian Ranking and Optimization under the guidance of Dr. Abhyuday Mandal. His work focuses on developing statistical methods that improve the reliability of rankings derived from limited or noisy data by explicitly incorporating uncertainty through Bayesian modeling. In particular, he will construct a double stochastic rank matrix and develop an R package to implement these methods.

Each year, the American Statistical Association (ASA) sponsors a two-day data science competition and "celebration of data" known as ASA DataFest. 

Founded in 2011 at UCLA, this event has grown dramatically, expanding to many host institutions across the country each spring. While the UGA Department of Statistics has participated in ASA DataFest in the past, 2026 was the first time the department has hosted the event. And we went all in! 

In a recent American Statistical Association (ASA) election, Dr. Prince Allotey was elected Council of Sections Representative for the ASA Section on Statistics and Data Science Education. This post has a three-year term starting in 2027. 

On May 7, the Department of Statistics hosted its annual Convocation event in Sanford Hall. This year separate ceremonies were held for undergraduates receiving their BS in either statistics or data science (or, in one student's case, both!) and graduate students receiving master's or PhD degrees in one of these disciplines.