Latest news

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.

We are excited to share that Professor Bin Yu has been chosen to be the Campion (President's Invited) Lecturer at this September's Royal Statistical Society Conference!  

Earlier this summer, UC Berkeley undergraduate Richard Yu presented his research on predicting the NBA draft to the Sacramento Kings Basketball analytics team and members of the front office, over Zoom (screenshots below).

Alumnus Wing Wong (B.A. 1976), was recognized with the 2021 COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship for his groundbreaking and fundamental contributions to statistical theory and applications, particularly in likelihood inference, Monte Carlo computation, Bayesian statistics, and computational biology.

About the Award

We are pleased to share the news that Jennifer Chayes has received the ACM Distinguished Service Award “for her effective leadership, mentorship, and dedication to diversity during her distinguished career of computer science research, teaching, and institution building”

From the ACM Announcement:

Prof. Bin Yu was honored as one of the most influential researchers of her time in Statistics and Data Science, for the excellence and impact of her work, and for her major contributions to the development and advancement of machine learning.

UC Berkeley Statistics Department Chair and Professor Sandrine Dudoit has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). She was one of 41 IMS Fellows selected in 2021.

La Shana Porlaris, Director of Student Services, was honored with an Excellence in Management Award at a campus virtual ceremony this afternoon.

The UC Berkeley Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching has presented Statistics Lecturer Cari Kaufman with an Extraordinary Teaching in

We are very pleased to announce that Professor Jasjeet Sekhon has been named among the 2021 Fellows of the American Statistical Association (ASA). Many congratulations to Jas on receiving this well-deserved honor!

Two Sigma is generously sponsoring a graduate student fellowship for the academic year 2021-2022.

We are very pleased to announce that Professor Alan Hammond has been named among the 2021 Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). Many congratulations to Alan on receiving this well-deserved honor!

Emeritus Professor and Professor of the Graduate School Nicholas Jewell was honored with the 2021 Nathan Mantel Award for Lifetime Contributions to Statistics in Epidemiology.

Below is the text from the official announcement:

Congratulations to Fernando Pérez for the shout out from Nature, featuring IPython/Jupyter among the “Ten computer codes that transformed science”, along with Fortran and the fast Fourier Transform. Below is an excerpt from Jeffrey M. Perkel's article:

Professor Emeritus Leo Goodman passed away yesterday, at the age of 92. 

Professor Goodman joined UC Berkeley in 1986, as Class of 1938 Professor in the Sociology Department and the Statistics Department, and retired in 2017.