Yi Chen, with Merck in Philadelphia, PA; Haileab Hilafu, with Vistakon in Jacksonville, FL; Xinyu Liu, with Kelly Services & Dow AgroScience in Indianapolis, IN; Guannan Wang, with SAS in Cary, NC; Li-Yu Wang, with Zurich Insurance Co. in Schaumburg, IL; Wenbo Wu, with Kelly Services & Dow AgroScience in Indianapolis, IN; Wenting Fan, with Liberty Mutual Insurance in Boston, MA; and Linwei Hu, with Liberty Mutual Insurance in Boston, MA.

Congratulations all around!!

The Department is delighted to announce that Business Manager Tim Cheek has been selected for a 2012 Franklin College Staff Excellence Award. Congratulations with this well deserved award Tim, and keep up the great work!

Susmita Datta and Sanjay Shete have been elected as Fellows of the American Statistical Association. Congratulations, Susmita and Sanjay!

The Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia invites applications for a faculty position at the rank of Lecturer or Instructor, starting August 2012. Preference will be given to strong applicants who qualify for the rank of Lecturer, which requires a Ph.D. in statistics or a closely related field. However, applicants with an M.S. degree in statistics, or a closely related field, and an exceptional record of teaching excellence will receive consideration at the rank of Instructor.

Congratulations to Andrew Anderson, Haileab Hilafu, and Minsoo Kim for receiving the University's Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. This award means that their teaching performance ranks in the top 10% of all TAs at the University! Fantastic job!

The student awards for 2011 went to: Cong Feng for best senior student, Yuhang Xu for best beginning PhD student, and Jacob Martin for best MS student. Congratulations to these hard working students!

Third-year PhD student Guannan Wang has been selected by SAS Institute to be a Statistical Summer Fellow for SAS's Statistical Applications R & D group. This is a 12-week expenses paid summer internship in Cary, NC. The internship will focus on Small Area Estimation research and SAS package development, and should be very beneficial to Guannan in her doctoral research. She is one of only two Statistics students selected nationwide for this internship. Congratulations!

The functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data analysis group in the Department of Statistics, University of Georgia will host the third NOGGINS workshop on Friday, April 20, 2012. The workshop provides a forum for scientific communication and collaboration between researchers in the area of neuroscience and neuroimaging. This year's keynote speaker is Professor Ian Dryden, of the University of South Carolina. The event is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).

Congratulations to Kim Love-Myers and Jaxk Reeves, whose work is quoted in the Reuters article, Insight: Mississippi pardons benefited whites by big margin

The Department is extremely excited with the news that Dr. Yehua Li has received an NSF CAREER award. Congratulations Yehua! As stated on the NSF website, CAREER awards are the NSF’s “most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations”. This description is an excellent fit for Yehua’s outstanding contributions to research and education.