REU Site: Diverse Undergraduate Research Experiences in Statistics

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The American Statistical Association (ASA) will invigorate the undergraduate research community in statistics by implementing a distributed network of research experiences for undergraduates sites. At each site, student teams will work with complex data sets from varied scientific and engineering disciplines in which statistics plays a key role for data analysis. Over a three year period, the project will have nine sites with four students per site, allowing 36 students to have a research experience in statistics during the lifetime of the grant. Recruitment will target women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. Supported students must be U.S. citizens, nationals, or permanent residents. Key metrics for success will be whether the students subsequently pursue graduate studies, what kind of career choices they make, and how their statistics training impacts their choice of careers and their success in such careers. This initiative should spark and sustain a new excitement about undergraduate research throughout the statistics discipline and has the potential to impact fields that rely on statistics such as engineering, atmospheric science, healthcare, and all kinds of public policy. A unifying theme of the funded proposals is that students will engage in all stages of the data analysis cycle, including: data verification, data cleaning, and data visualization, all the way to statistical modeling, prediction, and data mining/machine learning/computational statistics, as an integral part of their statistics research. One result of these REUs will be a larger number of students who are immersed in the kind of data science analysis that is emerging in every branch of science and engineering. At least 2 faculty mentors are necessary for each project. Priority will be given to faculty who either (a) have a strong track record as a mentor with undergraduate student researchers in the past, and/or (b) have a strong track record of independent research and who are eager to begin working with undergraduate students. The ASA views this new initiative as an opportunity to teach the teachers, too, by coordinating faculty training sessions.