In 1938 Jerzy Neyman, one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, established at Berkeley one of the first centers in the country for statistical research. Since its inception, graduates and faculty of Berkeley have shaped the foundations of statistics. Past faculty include such luminaries as David Blackwell, Leo Breiman, David Freedman, Lucien Le Cam, and Erich Lehmann. The Department, which currently has over 30 active faculty, is consistently ranked as one of the top two graduate programs in statistics internationally.  

Berkeley Statistics resides in the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). Formed in 2023, CDSS was the first new college at UC Berkeley in over 50 years. In 2026, Statistics and much of CDSS are slated to move to The Gateway, a new state-of-the-art research and teaching facility on Hearst Avenue. 

The department has an undergraduate, a master's, and a PhD program, with about 130 BAs, 50 MAs and 10 PhDs awarded each year. Departmental research interests are wide-ranging, with eighteen of our faculty holding joint positions in other departments such as Biostatistics, Demography, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Integrative Biology, and Mathematics.  Faculty members are frequently involved with research collaborations throughout campus, from small designed studies to large-scale data analysis projects, including ENCODE, the Cancer Genome Atlas Project, and the Cyber Discovery Initiative (CDI). Many faculty are also actively engaged in consulting with outside industries, as well as serving as experts for legal proceedings and policy makers. 

Prominent areas of research interest in the department include:

• Applications in Biology and Health Sciences
• Applications in Physical and Environmental Sciences
• Applications in the Social Sciences
• Causal Inference
• High Dimensional Data Analysis
• Machine Learning
• Nonparametric Inference
• Probability Theory
• Statistical Computing