Our keynote speaker was Mark Becker, Ph.D., Dean and Professor of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health of the University of Minnesota. He gave an enjoyable talk about his "(non)random walk" through his statistical career, discussing his views on why statistics can be a rewarding career path. He spoke about the freedom he has had along the way to choose to work in areas that he saw as pursuing his interests and working towards the common good of society. Our students found it to be a very motivating talk.
Several alumni returned last year to give presentations. Samantha Cruz (left) was among our first undergraduate statistics alumni and we were very happy to have her return. She spoke about her work for Titan Corporation on multipath errors from satellite transmissions.
Jessica Martinelli (right), M.S., chair of the Student Advisory Committee, 2002, discussed her new field of pharmacokinetics and presented an interesting application of a trimmed mean. This was a great talk for the many students who are interested in entering the pharmaceutical industry.
Scott Beattie (left), Ph.D., Senior Statistician at Eli Lilly and Company, talked about the many exciting opportunities at Eli Lilly.
David Burn (right), Ph.D., the Director, Technical Information Management at Consumers Union was a roommate of Mark Becker and returned to present a behind-the-scenes view of product testing and the vital role that statisticians play in consumer product testing.
The
Alumni Workshop is a great way of introducing new faculty members to alumni.
Steven Rathbun (left), Associate Professor, recently joined us. His area
of research is geostatistical analysis in the environmental sciences. He
spoke about geostatistical analysis of left-censored data.
Runze Li (right), Assistant Professor, came to Penn State in 2000. He discussed his research into the reproducibility for repeated-paired curve data. This research was motivated in part from projects within the Statistical Consulting Center.
The Alumni Workshop is a great opportunity to learn about
research currently being conducted by our students. Jim McDermott (left),
a doctoral candidate, used this opportunity to present some of his research.
He has been working on quantile estimation for large data sets.
Qin Xue (right), a first-year student in 2002, helped with the organization of our event.