The Berkeley Statistics Annual Research Symposium (BSTARS) brings together the Berkeley Statistics community and its industry partners to survey the latest research developments in the department, emphasizing possible applications to statistical problems encountered in industry.

BSTARS 2025 and 70th Anniversary Celebration

September 17, 2025  - University Club, Memorial Stadium, UC Berkeley

Join us for BSTARS 2025, a gathering for the UC Berkeley Statistics department and friends, featuring a keynote speech by Distinguished Professor Philip B. Stark. This year also marks our department's 70th anniversary, which we will celebrate alongside BSTARS, with a special keynote by Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School Peter Bickel, alum panel, and reception. We hope to see you there!

REGISTER

• 8:30am – Registration 
• Introductory Remarks – Ryan Tibshirani, Chair and Professor
• 9:00am - 9:25am Faculty Talk #1 – Ryan Giordano, Assistant Professor "Local Weighting--Based Diagnostics for Bayesian Poststratification"
• 9:25am - 9:50am Faculty Talk #2 – Sandrine Dudoit, Professor and Executive Associate Dean, CDSS "Investigating Stem Cell Differentiation and Differential Gene Expression using Transcriptome Sequencing"
• 9:50am - 10:30am Recruiter Tabling/Info 
• 10:30am - 11:30am Lightning talks – PhD students + Industry Guests
  • BlackRock – Pierre Demartines
  • Genentech – Na Xu '08
  • NVIDIA – Jiantao Jiao, Affiliated Assistant Professor
  • Two Sigma – Hue Wang '20
  • Voleon – Steve Howard '19
  • Jeremy Goldwasser, “Stable Rankings for Explainable AI"
  • Andy Shen, “Forest kernel balancing weights: model-guided features for causal inference”
• 11:30am - 12:30pm Keynote Talk #1 (BSTARS) – Philip Stark, Distinguished Professor, "Pay no attention to the model behind the curtain"
• 12:30pm - 2:00pm Lunch and Poster Session
• 2:00pm - 3:00pm Keynote Talk #2 (70th anniversary) – Peter Bickel, Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School, "My view of our department story"
• 3:00pm - 4:00pm Alumni and Friends Panel moderated by Bin Yu, Distinguished Professor
  • Raaz Dwivedi ‘21
  • Imola Fodor ‘99
  • Amanda L. Golbeck '77, '79, '83
  • Christopher Haulk '11 
  • Liza Levina ‘02
  • Jamie Murdoch ‘19
  • Jas Sekhon
  • Tao Shi '05
  • Hongyu Zhao ‘95
• 4:00pm - 5:30pm Reception 
  • reception slideshow

BSTARS 2025 Sponsors

Sponsorship

We are pleased to work with corporate partners to sponsor our annual Berkeley Statistics Annual Research Symposium (BSTARS).

Benefits include: preferred access and guaranteed admission, recognition by the chair and speakers in remarks and communications, signage, industrial speaking opportunity, and corporate information/recruiting table. Other opportunities: could include sponsoring the reception, keynote, AV, and more.

Ready to sponsor BSTARS?

Please contact Alex Coughlin, the Director of Communications and External Relations, if you are interested or have any questions.

Previous BSTARS Programs

Directions & Parking

BSTARS is held at the University Club at Memorial Stadium, above the UC Berkeley campus. Enter via the west concourse (near the Bank of the West ATM) adjacent to Piedmont Ave and take the elevators to the University Club on the 5th floor. Parking is available for purchase under Maxwell Family Field directly North of Memorial Stadium. More parking information is available via UC Berkeley Parking and Transportation.