Award-winning University of Chicago professor will convene fall seminar in Statistics of the Earth System
The Rutgers University-New Brunswick Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) and Department of Statistics are pleased to announce the appointment of Michael Stein , the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago, as the Inaugural Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a Visiting Distinguished Professor in Statistics for the 2018-2019 academic year.
Michael Stein
Dr. Stein is a leading expert on statistical descriptions of environmental processes varying in space and time, and on methods for combining monitoring data and physical simulations to assess the state of the environment. He is also interested in using computers to analyze environmental phenomena, such as air pollution and climate. He is a co-director of STATMOS , a National Science Foundation-funded network of statisticians with interest in atmospheric and ocean sciences. Dr. Stein is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
After receiving his B.S. in mathematics at MIT and his Ph.D. in statistics at Stanford, Dr. Stein joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1985. Over the course of his 33 years at Chicago, he has supervised 27 Ph.D. students and authored over 110 peer-reviewed papers.
During the fall 2018 semester, Dr. Stein and other faculty will teach an advanced course in the Statistics of the Earth System (offered as 16:218:601 for students in the Earth system sciences and 16:960:690 for students in Statistics). The course will combine a small number of faculty lectures with intensive workshopping of student research projects related to environmental statistics.
One of the goals of the course is to foster sustained collaboration between faculty, postdocs, and students in the Earth system science and in statistics. Those interested in participating in the course should fill out a survey indicating their interest and describing the research problems in environmental statistics, environmental data analysis, or relevant statistical theory that they are pursuing.
An institute of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, EOAS catalyzes research, education and engagement that advances the scientific understanding of the past, present and future of the Earth system and builds the knowledge and perspective needed for state, national and global stewardship of a healthy, sustainable and resilient planetary environment.
The goal of the EOAS’s new Distinguished Visiting Fellow program is to seed new cross-disciplinary collaborations by bringing distinguished leaders and their new perspectives to campus for extended visits. One of EOAS’s goals with Dr. Stein’s visit is to catalyze new cross-campus collaborations related to statistics and data analysis in the Earth system sciences.
In addition to EOAS, Dr. Stein’s visit is co-sponsored by the Rutgers-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences.