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Congratulations to our PhD students Stephanie DeGraaf, Billy Fang and Chelsea Zhang who have all been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships! The NSF GRFP program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions.

Congratulations to Rebecca Barter and Shamindra Shrotriya for winning the Geisinger Health Collider Project! From the article:

Department researcher Chris Paciorek was one of 10 members on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee that considered the state of the science in determining the degree to which extreme weather and climate events are influenced by climate change.

More details including a free download of the committee's report, released March 11, can be found here:

From the article:

Jordan has worked on ideas that span computer science and statistics. The two fields have historically proceeded along separate paths, but he sees them as natural allies. "Big Data," he says, "is the phenomenon that has drawn them together."

From the article:

Yu and her team had to analyze a torrent of fMRI data to identify from thousands of movie clips the 100 frames that most likely matched a given voxel activity pattern. They then “averaged” these shapes to yield the outline of what the subjects were seeing.

From the article:

Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues are planning to investigate the long-term health effects of the gene variants they’ve found. They may help explain why some of us metabolize fats more effectively than others, and why omega-3s haven’t been the heart panacea once hoped.

Professor Stark's urban foraging expeditions have been featured in numerous news outlets.

Highlights:

Ph.D. candidate Christine Ho is raising funds for the fight against HIV/AIDS as a member of Cal's AIDS/Life Cycle 2015 team. The team has raised more than $1 million in nine years.

Professor David Brillinger will deliver the 2016 Tukey Lecture at the IMS / Bernoulli Society World Congress in Toronto.

The Tukey Lecturer is chosen every four years by the Bernoulli Society Subcommittee on Named Lectures for the World Congress; it is one of the highest academic honours bestowed by the Bernoulli Society.

Prof. Noureddine El Karoui has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). An induction ceremony will take place at the IMS Presidential Address and Awards session at JSM in Seattle.

Professor El Karoui received the award for his fundamental contributions to statistical methods in high dimension, especially in the study of highdimensional sample covariance matrices with sparse entries.

The Presentation Ceremony was on Saturday, April 25th at the 152nd Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. New members are introduced to their colleagues in the Academy and sign the “Registry of Membership” in the NAS Building in Washington, DC.

Our department is one of the nation's fastest-growing Statistics programs. See the American Statistical Association interview with Prof. Ani Adhikari.

Kellie Ottoboni, first-year PhD student, won a 2015 Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship. From the site: "Microsoft Research recognizes these outstanding graduate students, who represent a selection of the best and the brightest in their fields."

Two former PhD students from the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics are among the recipients of this year's Sloan Research Fellowships. They are Jian Ding (PhD 2011, supervisors Elchanan Mossel and Yuval Peres) in Mathematics and Peter Ralph (PhD 2009, supervisor Steven Evans) in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology.

“Restoring Value to Minimum Variance,” by Lisa Goldberg, Ran Leshem, and Patrick Geddes, won a Special Distinction Award as part of the 2014 Markowitz Prize for the best papers appearing in the Journal of Investment Management. 

Professor Ben Recht won the 2015 William O. Baker award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Science for his contributions to Data Science.

Prof. Peter J. Bickel received a doctor honoris causa from ETH Zurich on 22 November 2014. The translation of the laudation (in German) reads "for fundamental contributions in semiparametric, robust and high-dimensional statistics, and for seminal influence in mathematical statistics and its applications."