Why Study Statistics and Data Science at Wash U
Statistics — as a core discipline focusing on data-driven discovery, understanding, and decision-making — is rapidly evolving and advancing in the data science era. The new Department of Statistics and Data Science (SDS) strives to be a world-class department with outstanding scholars who will transform the university's intellectual community not only through their own activities and achievements but also through synergistic collaborations with existing faculty and departments across Arts & Sciences, the McKelvey School of Engineering, and all of the other schools at the university.
The department aims to provide a foundation for ambitious and innovative digital transformation across a range of disciplinary areas, filling a vital niche in the current academic landscape that leverages the emerging opportunities of computational and data science. SDS values foundational as well as transdisciplinary scholarship and will focus on using data to offer solutions to some of the most complex global issues.
Faculty Research
The interdisciplinary interests of our faculty span a broad range of areas including the application of statistics and data science to medicine, finance, environmental sciences, and technology. Research interests of our faculty include the following:
1. Bioinformatics
2. Bootstrap methodology
3. Environmental statistics
4. Functional data analysis
5. High-dimensional statistics
6. Statistical computing for massive data
7. Mathematical and statistical finance
8. Model selection and post-selection inference
9. Network analysis
10. Objective Bayes
11. Robust statistics
12. Statistical and machine learning
13. Time series and spatial statistics
