Twin Cities Chapter members

The Twin Cities (TC) Chapter was established in 1957 and currently has more than 200 members. Regular chapter meetings are held at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and University of St. Thomas (UST).

Chapter membership includes professionals from the academic, public, and private industrial sectors. Chapter meetings, which include guest speakers, are open to members and nonmembers. This past year, several chapter meetings included presentations and dinner or refreshments. Some of the meetings were organized with the UST Applied Probability and Statistics departmental seminar, cosponsored by the Center of Applied Mathematics. The mean and standard deviation for attendance are 20 and five people, respectively.

Meetings are announced on the chapter website and via email. Meeting announcements state: “The food and beverages will be available free of charge for Twin Cities Chapter members. For nonmembers, there will be a charge of $3 for students and $10 for nonstudents. These fees will also allow you to become a chapter member!” This route to membership permits involving more people, especially students, in chapter activities, and they stay in the chapter for many years.

The TC Chapter also has sponsored several career days and received ASA grants to help support these events. The career panels included presentations and discussion by statisticians from academic, business, and government institutions and attracted students looking to a future career and current statisticians interested in hearing about statistics careers in other employment areas.

Recent discussions have included the following:

• Galin Jones, UMN, School of Statistics, “Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Can We Trust the Third Significant Figure?”
• Vladimir Cherkassky, UMN, Electrical and Computer Engineering, “Predictive Learning: Methodology and Applications”
• Daniel Kaplan, De Witt-Wallace, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, “Macalester College: Our Abstinence-Based Curriculum and other Stories from Statistics Education” and “Computing Using ‘the Most Probable Supposition’”
• R. Dennis Cook, UMN, School of Statistics, “Comparing Two Multivariate Normal Means”
• Sarah Hurwicz Kogut, Celgene Corporation, “Clinical Trial Design Issues in Studying Treatment of Chronic Pain”
• Jennifer Woychik and Mark Jadin (with P. Persons and A. Shemyakin), UST, Mathematics, “Modeling Multivariate Financial Data Using Copula Functions”
• Paul Alper, UST (retired) “Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception”
• Misha Shvartsman, UST, Mathematics, “Phenomenological versus Statistical Thermodynamics: The Argument That Has Never Been Settled”
• Scot Adams, UMN, “Developments in the Master of Financial Mathematics Program in the School of Mathematics at UMN”
• Milo Schield, Augsburg College, “Statistical Literacy with Multivariate Content”
• Jason McClintic, U.S. Navy, and Arkady Shemyakin, UST, “Parametric Estimation for Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT)”
• Mark E. Werness, UST, “The Statistics Program at UST”
• Alica Johnston, Macalester College, “Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice”
• Allison LaPointe, Minnesota Department of Health, “The Road Less Traveled: Statistics in Epidemiology/Public Health”