Vision for the Department

Rick Paik Schoenberg, UCLA Statistics

1) Department’s goals.

2) Department Administration.

3) Department outreach.

1) Department’s goals.Short Term and Long Term Goals for the Department What will be your primary focus in your first term as department head?

* Continued growth and hiring.* Undergraduate major.* Industrial outreach.

Consulting center. Self-supporting masters in Applied Statistics?

The department will have 4+ positions to fill next year. What will be your hiring strategies?

* Aggressive pursuit of top applicants.* Main areas: machine learning, nonparametric statistics, environmental and spatial-temporal statistics, social statistics, computational and financial statistics, Bayesian statistics.* Keep striving for increased diversity.

NRC ranking criteria.

What are your criteria for granting tenure to assistant professors and promotion to full professor for associate professors?

* Excellence in research, teaching and service.* Publication numbers should not be overemphasized.

Quality and journal quality are more important.* Grants and student support are highly valued.* Creativity and genuine breakthroughs should be most valued.

What is your perspective on faculty obtaining grants? For example, how important do you feel it is to have faculty members serving as PI on grants as opposed to working in co-PI relationships? * Both are important. Interdisciplinary work must be encouraged.

Does outside consulting by faculty for fee have a place in a research department of statistics?

* Yes. Outreach to industry, especially local industry, is important. This should be internalized if possible, e.g. via a consulting center.Excessive outside consulting should be discouraged if it interferes with University activities.

A number of departments now have an undergraduate major in statistics. What are the pros and cons of starting an undergraduate major from your perspective?

Pros: * Feed students into graduate program.* Extend role of department on campus. Increased visibility.* Increased outreach to other Universities and industries.* Service to the Community.

Cons:* Increased teaching burden on the Department.* Increased burden on staff, especially SAO.

Overall, the pros definitely outweigh the cons.

UCLA’s Undergraduate Major (red) and Minor (blue)

What do you think our research strengths are and why you think we are strong in these areas?

The faculty is very strong generally, and unusually broad and applied, which is great. Particular strengths seem to be in nonparametric statistics, semi-parametric statistics and time series. The dept is perhaps the world leader in these areas. The program also seems really strong in bioinformatics, biostatistics and Bayesian statistics.

We are no doubt weak in some major research areas. Are there any such areas that you see as priority for hiring? What would be your strategy for hiring faculty in an area of weakness?

There is no glaring weakness. I would like to see continued growth in machine learning, environmental statistics, nonparametric statistics, and spatial-temporal statistics. Computer vision and other computer science related applications and applications in finance and human genetics seem to be areas that could be bolstered.

2) Department AdministrationHow would you envision running the day-to-day details of the department?

* Delegation is extremely important.* Assignments should have clear goals and clear, reasonable deadlines.* Continual communication and oversight.* Spread duties as fairly and evenly as possible.

How will you use faculty committees to help run the department?

* Extensively. Establishing a committee to oversee a departmental change is almost always a good procedure.* Hiring committees, merit review committees, graduate admissions, industrial and alumni outreach, newsletter, graduate curriculum, undergrad curriculum, seminars, space, computing.* An Executive Committee should meet weekly or bi-weekly.* Almost all committees should have a leader and a clear, well defined task.* Departmental Faculty meetings should be monthly.* At Annual Faculty Retrea, we review progress of all grad students and discuss departmental changes.

This is clearly the best chance you will have to get additional resources from the dean. What do you see as the major needs of the department?

* Continued growth in hiring ladder faculty.* Increased space and support for labs.* Increased financial independence.

UCLA, summer 2012: 9.5 regular faculty.All male.0 Assistant Professors.1 Associate Professor.1 (deLeeuw) about to retire, and 2 others (Bentler, Li) likely to retire soon.Grossly insufficient faculty office space and lab space.

In 2012-13, we hired an excellent female Assistant Professor (J. Li). This year, we are hiring 2 more positions.Increased faculty office space and graduate student office space by 10-20%.Professional MS program to start in Fall 2015.Consulting Center is rapidly growing paying clients.

3) Department Outreach.The department offers two non-traditional MS degrees, an MS degree in Analytics and a distance learning MS degree in applied statistics. How do you envision managing these two degrees?

* These are extremely important and bold initiatives. They must be supported and thrive.* Each should have a director in the Executive Committee.* Self-supporting degree.* Evening classes?* Increased outreach to local industry.

What is your perspective on interdisciplinary research? In particular, what are the groups that the department should strive to interact with, if any?

* Computer vision and computer science generally.* Bioinformatics and medicine.* Human genetics.* Environmental sciences.

What are your ideas for increasing the diversity of faculty and students within our department?

* Diversity must be given very high priority in hiring.* Aggressive outreach is necessary.* Advertising in outreach journals is a good idea.* Increasing rankings helps generally.

There are a number of projects which cannot be supported using state funds. These projects require raising funds from corporations and former students. What is your experience in this area?

* I became Vice Chair for External Affairs in 2004, at which time I started forming and having meetings with our Industrial Advisory Committee.This led to some donations, and mainly internships, partnerships, and jobs for our students.

* Since 2008 I have headed the Newsletter Committee. The annual newsletter is used to reach out to alumni and to increase visibility generally.

* Since 2011 we have sponsored DataFest, an annual event each Spring with industry sponsors who often become donors and close partners of our department, working on projects with us and hiring our students.

* This year our Department has begun more active outreach to businesses in our community. Faculty road shows.

UCLA’s Undergraduate Enrollment