In September 1965, Dr. Carl F. Kossack was appointed permanent Department Head and served in this capacity until 1979. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, Dr. Rolf E. Bargmann from IBM (image left) accepted an appointment as Professor, and Kanti Patel was appointed as Assistant Professor. The Department functioned with four faculty members and five adjunct members for two years. In the summer of 1966 it hosted the SREB Summer Session with financial support from NSF. Dr. James W. Walker of Georgia Tech augmented the Department’s teaching staff for this session. Similar to other universities, UGA experienced rapid enrollment increases in the 1960’s. Five new assistant professors were added during the 1967-68 academic year. The Department was authorized to offer the Ph.D. degree in Statistics in 1967. Prior to this time, four doctorates in mathematics with dissertations in statistics had been awarded, with the first one going to Dr. P. V. Rao in 1963 with Dr. Cohen as his major professor. Also in 1967, M.S. degrees and B.S. degrees in Statistics were approved. In 1968, the Department initiated a master’s program in Computer Science under the direction of Professor Bargmann. Dr. L. R. Shenton was hired by the Computer Center in 1967 and had a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics. Accompanying Dr. Shenton to the Computer Center in 1967 was his Ph.D. student, Kermit Hutcheson. Dr. Hutcheson joined the Department of Statistics in 1969 as an Assistant Professor, served as Assistant Head and Graduate Coordinator for several years, and retired in 2001. Collaborative research and joint appointments were particularly prevalent during the early history of the Department. In addition to the aforementioned joint appointments, there were joint faculty appointments in forestry and education. In 1974, a joint appointment for an experiment station statistician and an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Computer Science was negotiated with the College of Agriculture Experiment Station, and Dr. Glenn Ware was appointed to this position. The Department enjoyed good successes in the late 1960’s and 1970’s with external funding via computing contracts, a large ONR Themis grant, a NASA contract and AFoSR funding. Consequently, the UGA statistics program had a strong computing flavor, with the exception of Cliff Cohen’s work on the topic of reliability and life testing, and was closely tied to applications. During this time period there was an unusually high rate of transition in the faculty, especially at the junior level, partly due to high demands for people with computational skills. During 1972-1976, the Department averaged awarding seven M.S. degrees and four Ph.D. degrees per year. In 1976 the Department’s graduate program had approximately 50 students, about 30 of whom were at the master’s level. In 1977 a professional Masters in Applied Mathematical Sciences (MAMS) degree was established by the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Statistics and Computer Science and the Management Science Program in the College of Business. Two to three MAMS degrees were awarded annually in statistics from 1977 to the early 2000’s. In subsequent years, interest in the program faded, and MAMS was officially discontinued in the Department around 2005. Also in 1977, Bill McCormick joined the Department, making him the longest serving current faculty member. A national report on statistics programs by Ingram Olkin listed 7 statistics faculty members at UGA in 1970, 8 in 1975 and 10 in 1980. However, the size of the Department of Statistics and Computer Science was actually larger because it also contained several computer science faculty who were not included in Olkin’s counts. With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: <Strength in Numbers: The Rising of Academic Statistics Departments in the U.S., A Brief History of the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia, 2013,381-393, John Stufken and Robert L. Taylor, editors Alan Agresti and Xiao-Li Meng>
