HISTORY

The Department of Statistics at George Mason University was founded in 1992, initially named the Department of Applied and Engineering Statistics in the School of Information Technology and Engineering, now known as the College of Engineering and Computing. It emerged from the Department of Operations Research and Applied Statistics and launched the MS program in Statistical Science. In 2006, the Department was renamed to the Department of Statistics as William Rosenberger, a Distinguished University Professor, became its third chair. Rosenberger’s leadership from 2006 until 2019 marked a period of expansion for the department, hiring several faculty members and creating the PhD program in Statistical Science, the MS in Biostatistics, and the BS in Statistics.

In 2019, Jiayang Sun, Professor and Bernard Dunn Eminent Scholar, was appointed department chair after a national search. Concurrently, she was selected as the inaugural ASA/ACM/AMS/IMS/MAA/SIAM Science & Technology Policy Fellow in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). During her fellowship, Professor Anand Vidyashankar served as interim chair. The department has since expanded to a robust core faculty of 21, advancing in research, scholarship, and national ranking and modernizing its programs, including introducing a Statistical Data Science Track within the MS in Statistical Science. The department also benefits from the contributions of additional adjunct and visiting faculty members, with over 140 graduate and undergraduate students across five programs and certificates. The department expects continued growth and further expansion with new hires. As a growing force of statistical research and data science, it contributes to the foundation of statistics and data science, and fosters interdisciplinary partnerships across computing, engineering, statistics, biopharmaceutical and healthcare, policy, and government sectors.

Current faculty includes nationally recognized experts in statistics, such as Jiayang Sun, William Rosenberger, John Stufken, Lily Wang, Anand Vidyashankar, and Inchi Hu, and other dynamic and young statisticians. Their contributions have significantly shaped the department's history and research. In addition to their achievements and elected fellowships in national and international professional societies, Professor Rosenberger was recently selected as the 41^st Fisher Memorial Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

The department’s research is broadly classified into statistics, biostatistics, and data science. The faculty’s work in biostatistics has contributed to clinical trials, medical and genetic research, health care, cancer studies, and biometrics. In the realm of data science, faculty’s expertise extends to tackling foundational, complex, high-dimensional, or big data challenges, including data reduction, compression, mining, ML, AI, feature selection, selection bias, measurement errors, experimental designs, privacy, security analytics, and geometric and topological data analysis. In foundational and emerging statistical fields, their research drives innovation and advances in statistical sciences and interdisciplinary domains, including imaging, spatial, and spatio-temporal data applications and causal inference.

The Department of Statistics hosts weekly seminars that nurture a sense of community and encourage collaboration among students, faculty, and guest speakers on topics related to research and application in statistical sciences and data science. They are sponsored by statistician R. Clifton Bailey, who has several decades of experience working on high-profile statistical studies for the government.

2019 – present: Jiayang Sun, Bernard Dunn Eminent Scholar, Fellow IMS, ASA, and Elected Member ISI

2019 – 2020: Anand Vidyashankar (Interim Chair)

2006 – 2019: William Rosenberger, Fellow IMS, ASA, Distinguished University Professor

1998 – 2006: A. Richard Bolstein

1992 – 1998: Edward Wegman