The department is pleased to announce the promotion of Lily Wang to Associate Professor with tenure.  Our warmest congratulations to Dr. Wang, whom we wish continued success in her academic endeavors.

Joining us from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Wenxuan Zhong and Dr. Ping Ma offer a plethora of experience including Doctoral degrees from Purdue University and serving as Postdoctoral Fellows at Harvard University.  Dr. Zhong, whose interests include computational biology, bioinformatics and variable selection, will join our department as a tenure track Associate Professor while Dr. Ma joins us as Adjunct Associate Professor with interests in bioinformatics, functional data analysis and geophysics.  We are thrilled to have both Dr. Zhong and Dr.

Congratulations to Dr. Zaid Abdo on his appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor.  Dr. Abdo recently joined the USDA Agricultural Research Service here in Athens and holds a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from the University of Idaho where he also served as Assistant Professor from 2006-2011 and Associate Professor from 2011-2012.

The 2013 USCOTS lifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education has been awarded to Christine Franklin!

This is a biennial award presented at the U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics to an individual who, over an extended period of time, has made lasting contributions with broad impact to the field of statistics education, especially the teaching and learning of college-level statistics.

Christine Franklin and Dr. Rob Gould had an article regarding the increasing importance of statistics education published in the Huffington Post.  To read the article, click on the following link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-franklin/statistics-education_b_3273855.html

Congratulations to the 2013 recipients of the Sarah Moss Fellowship: Dr. Cheolwoo Park and Dr. Abhyuday Mandal 

The department would like to extend its congratulations to William Thomas Purvis for receiving this year's Best Capstone Student Award!  This is the inaugural award and will be given annually.  The Best Capstone Student Award is possible through the generous gift of Professor Emeritus Kermit Hutcheson who wanted this gift to support the undergraduate program in statistics.

The Department wishes to congratulate the 2013 Mu Sigma Rho Inductees.  Mu Sigma Rho is the national honorary society for statistics. Its purpose is the promotion and encouragement of scholarly activity in statistics, and the recognition of outstanding achievement among the students and instructional staff in eligible academic institutions.  

Replacing Julie Davis will be Megan Weatherford, who has transferred from the College of Veterinary Medicine.  She is a graduate of The University of Georgia and brings with her several years of administrative experience.  Feel free to stop by the main office to meet her! 

After graduating from the Department of Statistics in 2009, Yun worked as a biostatician in the Center of Biostatistics in AIDS Research (CBAR) at Harvard University for 3 years. This past July, however, she and her family moved to Shanghai, China. She is now working as a statistician supporting Health Outcomes in the Eli Lilly & Company's Shanghai office. Yun's husband (2009 PhD in Plant Biology from UGA) is working as a research scientist in DuPont's Shanghai office. Their daughter is 4 and enjoys her new life in the preschool.