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In May, Statistics held a Special Seminar honoring the legendary Professor David Blackwell (1919-2010), featuring talks by Distinguished Professor Peter Bickel and Associate Professor Will Fithian.

The UC Berkeley Department of Statistics celebrated the graduates of the class of 2025 on Wednesday, May 22nd, at Zellerbach Playhouse on the Berkeley campus. Department Chair Haiyan Huang led commencement activities, which featured an address by Nobel Laureate Guido Imbens.

Current Ph.D. student and alum Daniel Raban (B.A. Mathematics, 2018) was a finalist at the 2025 UC Berkeley Grad Slam competition. Grad Slam is a UC-wide sponsored competition designed to showcase graduate student research in three-minute talks for a general audience.

Distinguished Professor Philip B. Stark has been awarded the 2025 Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest. The award honors research by faculty that addresses critical needs and issues affecting local, state, national, or global communities.

Distinguished Professor Bin Yu is co-organizing a Workshop on Veridical Data Science. Talk submissions are accepted until April 25, 2025.

https://www.integreat.no/events/public-events/workshops/veridical-data-science.html

Distinguished Professor Steven Evans is serving the spring 2025 semester as a Research Professor in the Probability and Statistics of Discrete Structures program at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath).

Associate Professor Shirshendu Ganguly has been named a Miller Research Professor for the 2025-26 academic year at UC Berkeley's Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science.

Assistant Professor Song Mei has been named a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship recipient. Read more via UC Berkeley Public Affairs.

Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School Michael I. Jordan has been named a Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate. The 17th edition of the award recognizes and rewards excellence in research and cultural creation, especially contributions that have achieved broad impact due to their originality and significance.

The White House has announced President Joseph Biden awarded Berkeley Statistics alum Tamara Broderick, Ph.D. '14, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.

The Department of Statistics held the Berkeley Statistics Annual Research Symposium (BSTARS) on November 14th at California Memorial Stadium. The event brought together the Berkeley Statistics community and its industry partners to survey the department's latest research developments and emphasize possible applications to statistical problems encountered in industry.

Assistant Professor Jacob Steinhardt has co-founded Transluce, a non-profit AI research lab. Transluce is building open, scalable technology to understand AI systems and steer them in the public interest.

Arash Jamshidpey and Evan Munro joined the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics as Neyman Visiting Assistant Professors in the fall of 2024.

Assistant Professor Song Mei has been awarded a significant research grant by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. 

Dr. Joshua Grossman will join the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics as an Acting Assistant Teaching Professor in the fall of 2024. Grossman is a 2024 alum of Stanford, where he earned his Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering (MS&E), advised by Sharad Goel.

Dr. Amanda Coston will join the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2024. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research on the Machine Learning and Statistics Team. 

Yoav Benjamini, the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Tel Aviv University and former Visiting Professor at the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics, has won the 2024 Rousseeuw Prize.

The Society for Science announced that Lester Mackey M.A. '11, has joined the Society’s National Leadership Council (NLC). Formed in 2018, the NLC comprises alumni from the Society’s three science competitions: the Science Talent Search, the International Science and Engineering Fair and its middle school science research competitions.

'21 M.A. program alum and current Ph.D.

Professor Emerita and Professor of the Graduate School Deborah Nolan has been awarded the Berkeley Faculty Service Award by the UC Berkeley Faculty Senate.