From left: Elliott Hirshman, UMBC provost; Nagaraj Neerchal, department chair; and Bimal Sinha, founding faculty member

The University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) Department of Mathematics and Statistics celebrated the 25th anniversary of its statistics graduate program on April 25 in conjunction with their Fourth Annual Probability and Statistics Day. More than 100 participants attended the silver jubilee, where Ray Carroll, Bruce Lindsey, Ron Butler, and Nancy Geller were the keynote speakers. Many alumni also presented talks.

The program was inaugurated by UMBC’s provost, Elliot Hirshman. In addition to plenary and parallel sessions covering a variety of topics, the jubilee featured oral and poster presentations by graduate students and the presentation of awards for best oral and poster presentation. Later, Dean Rous of UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences recognized every statistics doctoral student to graduate in the past 25 years.

Rous also recognized the contributions of Bimal Sinha, the program’s senior most and founding faculty member, and commended the leadership of Nagaraj Neerchal as department chair and Anindya Roy as graduate program director.

The conference ended with a banquet and speech by ASA President Sastry Pantula, titled “All I Want to Do When I Grow Up … Be an ASA President.”

Visit UMBC’s student newspaper for more about the celebration.