In 1938 Jerzy Neyman, one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, established at Berkeley one of the first centers in the country for statistical research. Since its inception, graduates and faculty of Berkeley have shaped the foundations of statistics. Past faculty include such luminaries as David Blackwell, Leo Breiman, David Freedman, Lucien Le Cam, and Erich Lehmann. We currently have over 30 active research faculty in the department, four of whom are members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Berkeley Statistics currently resides in the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). The department is consistently ranked as one of the two premier graduate programs in statistics nationally. The department has an undergraduate, a master's, and a PhD program, with about 250 BAs, 40 MAs and 8 PhDs awarded each year. 

Departmental research interests are wide-ranging, with eighteen of our faculty holding joint positions in other departments such as Biostatistics, Demography, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Integrative Biology, and Mathematics.  Faculty members are frequently involved with research collaborations throughout campus, from small designed studies to large-scale data analysis projects, including ENCODE, the Cancer Genome Atlas Project, and the Cyber Discovery Initiative (CDI). Many faculty are also actively engaged in consulting with outside industries, as well as serving as experts for legal proceedings and policy makers. 

Prominent areas of research interest in the department include:

• Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
• Biology and Medicine
• Causal Inference and Graphical Models
• High Dimensional Data Analysis
• Non-Parametric Inference
• Physical and Environmental Sciences
• Probability Theory
• Social Sciences
• Statistical Computing