UConn Department of Statistics Celebrates 60th Anniversary

Haim Bar and Jun Yan, University of Connecticut

A special conference with the theme “Excellence in Statistical Science” was held October 14–16, 2022, on the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the department of statistics. About 150 people attended.

The opening was chaired by the department head, Ming-Hui Chen. Welcome remarks were delivered by UConn president, Radenka Maric; dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences, Juli Wade; and ASA executive director, Ronald Wasserstein.

The academic part of the program featured keynote addresses from renowned statisticians and signature departmental lectures. The keynote addresses were given by Nancy Reid of the University of Toronto about distributions of parameters and David Blei of Columbia University about the blessing of multiple causes. The 2022 Makuch Lecture honored Clarice Weinberg from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Her talk was titled “Using Families to Identify Genetic and Environmental Contributors to Young-Onset Disease.” The Distinguished Alumni Lecture was delivered by 2022 awardee, Bani Malick of Texas A&M, and titled “Bayesian Local Models Using Partitions.”

In addition, two invited sessions on data science featured nine speakers from government, industry, and academia. The first session included Malini Iyengar of Teva Pharmaceuticals, Patrick J. Cantwell of the US Census Bureau, Brien Aronov of Travelers Insurance, Marcos Oliveira Prates of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Nathan Lally of HSB. The second session included Steve Leeds of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, Xia Wang of the University of Cincinnati, Chun Wang of Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Zoe Hua of Servier Pharmaceuticals.

One highlight of the event was a panel discussion, titled “UConn Statistics Department: Past, Present, and Future.” The panel was moderated by Ofer Harel, associate dean for research and graduate affairs. Panelists included several former and current faculty members with leadership roles in the department or college: Robert Riffenburgh; Uwe Koehn; Alan Gelfang; Tim Kileen; Nitis Mukhopadhyay; Dipak Dey; Joseph Glaz; and Ming-Hui Chen. In his nineties, founding head Riffenburgh attended the discussion live online. The panelists shared their perspectives and memories of the department throughout the past 60 years, as well as their thoughts about its bright future.

A Travelers student poster session attracted 18 submissions, many from current students. The posters were evaluated by a judging committee consisting of Feng Guo, Neil Spencer, Xia Wang, Xiaojing Wang (chair), and Yao Zheng. Awardees include Jackson Lautier for “Consumer Credit Risk Convergence: The Case for Performance-Based Interest Rate Reductions in Consumer Automobile Loans” and Jianmin Chen for “Tree-Guided Rare Feature Selection and Logic Aggregation with Electronic Health Records Data.”

Two career panels were geared toward students in statistics and data science. The first was on data science and moderated by Yishu Xue of Google. Panelists were Edan Bar of Bloomberg, Ved Desphande of Spotify, Ron Wasserstein of the ASA, and Haining Zhang of Travelers. The second panel was on statistics in pharmaceuticals and moderated by Yaohua Zhang of Vertex. Panelists included Joe Cappelleri of Pfizer, Dooti Roy of Boehringer Ingelheim, and Naitee Ting of Boehringer Ingelheim. Cappelleri and Ting are longtime adjunct professors in the department.

UConn Statistical Consulting Services was showcased at the conference. Statistical Consulting Services director, Timothy Moore, gave an overview of the history and current status of the service. Two student consultants, Eric Baron and Jung Wun Lee, shared their recent consulting projects.

The academic program concluded October 15 with an awards ceremony. The 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award winner, Bani Malick, handed plaques to this year’s honorees of departmental student awards, which included best performance in several core courses, a teaching award, and a service award.

The social part of the program included a banquet attended by 50 participants, a Jeopardy game night featuring statistics topics, and a field day with breakfast. Student leader Eric Baron organized the game night and field day.

The conference was a high note in a series of year-long activities celebrating the department’s 60th anniversary, including the 35th New England Statistics Symposium May 22–25, UConn STAT 2022 JSM Alumni and Friends Lunch on August 10, Statistics in Pharmaceuticals Conference August 22–23, 4th UConn Sports Analytics Symposium on October 8, and Pfizer Colloquium on October 19.