University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Statistics and Operations Research

The Statistics and Operations Research Department of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was formed in 2003 as a result of a merger between the former Department of Statistics and Department of Operations Research. Previously, the Department of Statistics existed since 1946, when it was founded by Gertrude Cox, who hired Harold Hotelling as the department's first chair.

The department specializes in inference, decision-making, and data analysis involving complex models and systems exhibiting both deterministic and random behavior. We focus on developing and analyzing the necessary quantitative and computational tools to enable practitioners to solve problems in statistical and probabilistic analysis, modeling, optimization, and the evaluation of system performance. Our faculty engage in fundamental research in probability, statistics, stochastic processes, and optimization, and are also heavily involved with interdisciplinary areas of application such as genomics, biological modeling, environmental statistics, insurance and financial mathematics, revenue, workforce, and supply-chain management, traffic flow and congestion, and telecommunications. We offer graduate programs in Statistics and Operations Research and an undergraduate Mathematical Decision Sciences program. We also offer introductory service courses that are taken by a wide variety of students from across the campus.

Our department has been actively involved with NISS from the beginning, and we are the home department of the current NISS Director. We have also supplied one Associate Director of SAMSI, and several faculty have been involved in leadership roles for individual SAMSI programs.