Florida State University, Department of Statistics

The Department of Statistics at Florida State University was founded in September 1959 under the initiative and direction of Ralph Bradley. Since that time it has become one of the leading statistics departments in the United States. It has been the home at one time or another to many of the pioneers of modern statistics, including Dev Basu, Jaroslav Hajek, Myles Hollander, Dennis Lindley, George Marsaglia, Frank Proschan, Richard Savage, Jayaram Sethuraman, and Frank Wilcoxon.

The department currently consists of 15 faculty (13 tenure-track) and about 50 graduate students. The faculty are active in a wide range of research areas including: image and shape analysis, model selection and aggregation, machine learning, wavelets, quality control, epidemiology, spatio-temporal models, statistics on manifolds, sparse regression and outlier detection, survival analysis, semi-parametric Bayesian methods, copula modeling, empirical process theory, state space models for decoding neuronal activity, computational biology, and Monte Carlo approaches for determining protein structure.

Statistics department faculty engage in interdisciplinary research with faculty in many other fields. Some recent examples include the statistical analysis of birdsong, climate and meteorological data, disease incidence and risk, and groundwater flow in karst plains.

The department's research is well funded by external grants. Current funding sources include NSF, NSA, NIH, ARO, AFOSR, ONR, Siemens Corporation, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

Photo: The Department of Statistics during its 50th year celebration.