Bill McCormick (1998-2000) and Ishwar Basawa (2000-2003) served as Interim Department Heads during a time that the Department attempted to recruit new leadership from the outside. While this was a period with formidable internal challenges, the Department maintained a remarkably high level of scholarly activity and productivity. These facts were already visible in an external review committee report in 1998. While the committee lavishly praised the quality of the curriculum, the research strength of both junior and senior faculty, and the leadership provided by Professor Taylor, it also expressed great concern about an apparent atmosphere of distrust among faculty. The hope was that new leadership could help to solve the problems, but as the committee noted in a word of caution, “… a head can only implement the collective wishes of the Department.” Multiple changes in the faculty line-up occurred during the period 1998-2003, leading to an overall decrease in faculty size. Faculty who were recruited during this period and are currently still in the Department include Xiangrong Yin (2000), Paul Schliekelman (2001), and Academic Professional Chandler Pike (2001). Some who were recruited during this period soon moved elsewhere, including Julie Berube and Jem Corcoran. Faculty who left for other positions or who retired during this period include Steve Rathbun (2001, Penn State University), Kermit Hutcheson (2001, retired), Bob Taylor (2002, Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University), Nancy Lyons (2002, retired), and Hubert Chen (2002, retired). Active recruiting for a Department Head continued nationally, resulting in the hiring of John Stufken for Fall 2003. Professor Stufken had been Program Director for Statistics at the NSF from 2000 to 2003, and was well acquainted with the Department since he had been a junior member of the faculty before leaving for a position in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. The Department has changed dramatically since 2003, both in terms of personnel and in terms of research emphasis. The change in emphasis is partly driven by a changed modus operandi in scientific research. In an era in which more and increasingly complex data are collected in virtually all areas of science, opportunities for statisticians in interdisciplinary collaborations are almost limitless. While advances and needs in scientific research make this a golden era for statistics, mining the gold also comes with tremendous challenges. In an academic environment, it requires faculty who are strong in their statistical areas of specialization and who can make major novel contributions to these areas, but who are also interested in working on real problems as part of interdisciplinary research teams. With this model in mind, the Department recruited six new tenure-track faculty between AY04 and AY07 (Nicole Lazar, Cheolwoo Park, Abhyuday Mandal, Jeongyoun Ahn, Yehua Li and Lily Wang). Two additional tenure-track faculty were recruited in AY11 (Jennifer Kaplan and Liang Liu), and are expected to work closely with collaborators in mathematics education and bioinformatics, respectively. During the same period, some faculty moved to other positions (Somnath Datta, University of Louisville; Robert Lund, Clemson University; Mary Meyer, Colorado State University; and Anand Vidyashankar, Cornell University) or retired (Ishwar Basawa in 2010). New developments at UGA also offer tremendous potential for new opportunities for Statistics. This includes the founding of a College of Public Health in 2005, the establishment of a new Medical Campus based on a 2008 partnership between UGA and the Georgia Health Sciences University, and approval from the Board of Regents in 2010 for a vast expansion of engineering degree programs. While the full impact of these developments on the Department is not yet clear, each will bring increased opportunities for teaching and research. At the time that this Chapter is written, multiple teaching and research collaborations between Statistics and the new Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics have already been developed. The Department also houses a Statistical Consulting Center (SCC), which has existed since 1990, but saw some changes in 1998, and major changes in 2008. Since 2008 the personnel consists of a Director, an Associate Director, and around 5 graduate consulting assistants. The Director, Jaxk Reeves, a tenured faculty member, has been involved with the SCC since 1990. The position of Associate Director (AD), created in 2008, was held by Dr. Jien Chen until 2010 and is now held by Dr. Kim Love-Myers, a non-tenure track faculty member. The SCC earns income from the consulting projects that it handles, and also receives financial support from the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), from the Graduate School, from the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and from small contributions to the salary for the AD from a few other colleges around campus. This support reflects the SCC’s impact on both research and teaching. The SCC primarily serves graduate students and faculty, and has potential to initiate interdisciplinary research projects. It has also served an increasing number of outside clients during the last few years. In AY12 the Department has 24 faculty (see Faculty History), 4 adjunct appointees, 4 staff members, 73 graduate students, and 51 undergraduate students. The graduate students include 15 secondary students, often supported by their other department. The Department provides an assistantship (teaching, research, or consulting) for about 35-40 graduate students. A significant portion of the undergraduate students are double majors, and a few are even triple majors. Both the size and quality of the undergraduate program have made major strides over the last decade under the leadership of Undergraduate Coordinator Christine Franklin and with buy-in from a significant portion of the faculty. In AY10, the Department awarded 10 BS degrees, 17 MS degrees, and 6 PhD degrees. Over the period 1964-2010, the Department has now awarded a total of 493 bachelor’s degrees, 544 master’s degrees, and 152 PhD degrees. Many of the current faculty are excellent teachers, and several have been recognized for this. In recent years, the Department has become very competitive for the Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award within the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. While the Department had to wait for a first winner until 1999, by now 5 nominations for this award have been successful. Recipients of this award are Christine Franklin (1999), T.N. Sriram (2004), Chandler Pike (2005), Jill Smith (2008), and Nicole Lazar (2010). In 2008, Christine Franklin was a recipient of the Honoratus Award for winning the Lothar Tresp Outstanding Honors Professor Award for the fifth time. The Department also had an earlier success with the General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship, for which Rolf Bargmann was the sole winner in 1980. In calendar year 2010, the Department taught a total of 18,397 credit hours. The number of credit hours stayed fairly constant over recent years, but increased significantly in AY11. A large introductory statistics course, STAT 2000, is the Department’s staple. This 4-credit course attracts close to 3,000 students per year. In AY11, through an agreement with the Terry College of Business, the Department began teaching an introductory statistics course for business students, MSIT 3000. This 3-credit course could eventually draw close to 1,000 students per year. To meet this increase, in 2010 the Department hired Lecturer Mark Werner, and converted temporary positions for Lecturer Kim Gilbert and Instructor Jack Morse into permanent positions. Several new undergraduate and graduate courses have been introduced over the past years. Most notable at the undergraduate level is a 2-semester capstone sequence, which culminates in a poster session near the end of the second semester in which students present the real projects that they worked on during that semester. At the graduate level, an extensive internal review of the graduate program was concluded in AY10, and resulted in, among other changes, the introduction of a sequence of courses aimed at exposing students earlier to research, writing, and sound professional practice. In terms of research, a committee that conducted the most recent Departmental Review noted in its February 2005 report that “The UGA Statistics Department is a high profile research department with an active research faculty.” The research profile of the Department has steadily increased since that time. Within the last couple of years, 14 of the then 16 tenure-track faculty brought in external research funding as PI or co-PI from a variety of sources, including NSF, NSA, NIH, USDA, ARO, and BLS. The Department has also been increasingly competitive for the M.G. Michael Award for Excellence in Research in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Established in 1944, this award was originally given to a single faculty member each year, but features currently up to three recipients per year. The Department has seen 5 successful nominations for this award: Clifford Cohen (1954), John Stufken (1988), Paul Schliekelman (2005), Nicole Lazar (2007), and Jeongyoun Ahn (2011). The Department continued to organize and host a number of very successful research conferences. In 2004, it hosted the meeting of the International Indian Statistical Association, with a local organizing committee of Professors G. Datta, Sriram, Vidyashankar and Seymour. In 2009 Professors Basawa and Sriram organized an international Symposium on New Directions in Asymptotic Statistics. In addition, in 2009 the fMRI research group in the Department, led by Professor Lazar, started an annual one-day workshop for the Network of Greater Georgia Institutions for Neuroimaging and Statistics (NOGGINS). The Department also hosted the 2003 ASA sponsored TEAMS conference on teacher preparation in statistics, co-chaired by Christine Franklin and Bob Taylor. Many faculty are active as Editors or Associate Editors for professional journals. Some have also written a textbook or research monograph. For the period covered in this section, this includes John Stufken (Orthogonal Arrays: Theory and Applications, Hedayat, Sloane and Stufken, Springer Verlag, 1999), Gauri Datta (Probability Matching Priors: Higher Order Asymptotics, Datta and Mukerjee, Springer Verlag, 2004), Lynne Billard (Symbolic Data Analysis: Conceptual Statistics and Data Mining, Billard and Diday, John Wiley & Sons, 2006), Nicole Lazar (The Statistical Analysis of Functional MRI Data, Lazar, Springer Verlag, 2008), and Christine Franklin (Statistics: The Art and Science of Learning from Data, 2nd Edition, Agresti and Franklin, Prentice Hall, 2008). The current faculty includes five ASA Fellows (Billard, Datta, Franklin, Sriram, and Stufken) and three IMS Fellows (Billard, Datta, and Stufken). Many have other awards and honors to show for their efforts, and several are quite active within our professional organizations. While more details can be found on the Department’s website at http://www.stat.uga.edu, we do want to mention the exceptional record of Lynne Billard. In addition to the aforementioned presidencies, Professor Billard’s many awards during the period covered in this section include the ASA Wilks Award (1999), Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000), the ASA Founders Award (2003), and the COPSS Elizabeth Scott Award (2008). 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>
