Latest news

- Written by Matthew Santillan for EECS

We are excited to share the news that Professor Ryan Tibshirani is the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Mortimer Spiegelman Award.

We are excited to share that Professor Bin Yu is the inaugural recipient of the IBS/WNAR Outstanding Impact Award!

Last week, we held our commencement for our graduating class of 2022. We heard words from a variety of speakers such as commencement speaker Peng Zhao or graduate student Ishaan Srivastava, and overall celebrated the graduation of over 100 students in total. Read more about the commencement here.

Congratulations to the class of 2022!

In a recent article, author Jon Bashor highlights how Professor Bin Yu and members from her group, including Chandan Singh as her deputy, responded to a call from a nonprofit to provide data science expertise at the onset of the COVID pandemic. Thanks to the combined efforts of her team in collaboration with Response4Life, the predictions of Yu's group helped deliver PPE to where it was most needed.

Two Sigma is generously sponsoring a graduate student fellowship for the academic year 2022-23. This competitive fellowship provides an academic year of support to an exceptional PhD graduate student within the department.

Congratulations to Alice Cima who has been awarded the Two Sigma Fellowship for 2022-23!

We are excited to highlight that Whyjay Zheng, a Berkeley Statistics postdoctoral fellow, has created an improved model of glacial movement that was recently featured in the Berkeley News. The model was published in the journal The Cryosphere.

Whyjay is currently working with Fernando Pérez.

We are excited to share that Professor Rasmus Nielsen has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences! He is one of six Berkeley faculty members that were elected this year in recognition of their achievements in research. Election to the National Academy of Sciences is a mark of excellence in science and is considered to be one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive. Congrats Professor Nielsen!

Director of Student Services La Shana Porlaris and Director of Administration Laura Slakey received Excellence in Management (EIM) awards at a campus ceremony Tuesday, May 3, 2022. The EIM award honors exemplary managers and supervisors who have led their teams and team members to meaningful accomplishments this past year. 

We are excited to share that Dr. Bin Yu, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Berkeley Statistics and Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at Cal, and the former president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, will be honored at the 38th ASA Quality and Productivity Research Conference (QPRC)! This conference will take place from June 13-16, 2022 at San Francisco State University and will surround the theme of Data, Statistics, and Responsibility.

We are excited to share that several Berkeley Statistic graduate students - Tiffany Ding, Emily Flanagan, Karissa Huang, Drew Nguyen, Andy Shen - have been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program! This prestigious fellowship supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines and is one of the oldest of its kind. Congratulations bears!

Professor Sam Pimentel has recently been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty! This award will be funding his project, "Integrating Optimal Design and Inference for Modern Observational Studies," which aims to develop new methods for inference about causal relationships in large administrative datasets. Congratulations!

Haiyan Huang, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).  Dr. Huang received the award for outstanding research in applied statistics, computational biology and applied probability and major contributions to institutional establishment of computational biology within data science.

The most recent graduate program rankings for the U.S. News have been released! Our campus is one among 800 institutions with graduate schools surveyed, along with over 2100 graduate programs. Though Berkeley programs can be found at the top of the list for a variety of disciplines, ranging from psychology to earth sciences, we are especially happy to share that our graduate program at Berkeley Statistics has been ranked No. 2 nationally!

We are excited to announce that Professor Bin Yu has been selected to deliver the 2023 Wald Memorial Lectures, which will be held at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). The Wald Lecturer is chosen annually by the IMS Committee on Special Lectures and is the highest honor bestowed by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). Bin Yu joins a list of distinguished Berkeley colleagues who have received this honor, including her two PhD mentors, Lucien LeCam and Terry Speed.

By Tiffany Lohwater and Julie Gipple

We are excited to announce that Deb Nolan, who is an emeritus professor UC Berkeley Statistics and a former associate dean for undergraduate education at the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), is back at CDSS! She has returned as Associate Dean for Faculty for the spring 2022 semester.

Read more about the exciting news at this link.

We are thrilled to announce that Associate Professor Elizabeth Purdom is among the second cohort of scientists to be named Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigators following a competition for individual awards. The first competition for individual awards was held in 2016, for awards beginning 2017, and a competition for team-based awards was held in 2018.

We are excited to share that the 2021 Line and Michel Loève International Prize in Probability has been awarded to Ivan Corwin of Columbia University. This prize commemorates Michel Loève, a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1948 until his untimely death in 1979. The Prize was established by his widow, Line, shortly before her death in 1992.

We are very excited to share the work that Sandrine Dudoit, Elizabeth Purdom, and their current and former students (Boying Gong, Davide Risso, Hector Roux de Bézieux, Kelly Street, and Koen Van den Berge) helped on to roll out the very first comprehensive atlas of brain cells.