Explorations in Statistics Research

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The Exploration in Statistics Research Workshop is a summer program that brings together forty participants from around the country, including twenty-four undergraduate students, eight graduate students, three researcher-presenters, two-to-three organizers, and two-to-three additional faculty. During this one-week workshop, undergraduates work closely with statisticians and graduate students to analyze data from important, current research problems at the frontiers of applied statistics. The first day of the program is a fast-paced introduction to statistical software. Then, led by a research statistician, students explore a research topic for two days. Over the course of six days, they work with three different researchers on three different topics. Each two-day exploration begins with the researcher's introducing his or her problem. This is followed by an investigation phase where students become familiar, primarily through visualization, with the data collected to address the problem. Students continue with their analysis in greater depth, they present and discuss their findings, and the researcher connects students findings to research results in the field. In addition, students attend three afternoon and evening sessions on how to apply to graduate school, what graduate school is like, and careers in statistics. The program is to be hosted at different institutions for four years. It will be held at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 2010, UCLA in 2011, and Columbia University in 2012.The Explorations in Statistics Research Workshop gives students an understanding of the role of statistics in scientific discovery, with the goal of encouraging them to pursue advanced studies in statistical science. Students employ computationally powerful, yet intuitive, modern statistical methods, and they delve into problems to begin to unlock the answers to important research questions. It is expected that this experience will entice participants into graduate studies in statistics. Furthermore, the program has the potential to increase the diversity of U.S. students who pursue graduate degrees in statistics. As seen in 2005 and 2006 pilot workshops, twenty-five of the forty-nine undergraduate participants in the program were women, and eleven were students from historically under-represented groups in science. Furthermore, the program is expected to improve the training of the workforce by exposing current and future faculty to innovative approaches to teaching statistics that are more applied and computationally-based and more likely to excite students about statistics research. In addition, educational materials from the workshop projects will be disseminated to the broader statistics community for use in undergraduate statistics courses.