Statistics is the science of collecting data, summarizing data, making sense of data, and drawing inferences from data. With research and decisions increasingly being data-driven, basic knowledge of statistical concepts and methods is becoming more important. Our faculty members apply statistics to research in a range of fields, including functional MRI, behavioral science, epidemiology, biology, medical imaging and network theory. Statisticians are often part of larger interdisciplinary research teams because, typically, they do not have ownership of data and collaborate with researchers who do. That, in part, makes being a statistician so much fun; as already noted by John W. Tukey, statisticians “get to play in everyone's backyard.”
Our areas of expertise
Experimental design, functional MRI (fMRI) networks, methods for missing data, mixed models, orthogonal arrays, time-series, machine learning, causal inference, Bayesian inference, computational statistics, high-dimensional data, and statistical methods in education. Applications are numerous and include medical imaging, environmental modeling, transportation, educational and psychological testing, finance, and targeted medicine.