The 190S seminar provides guidance and orientation around the research process, writing (including the - required - use of technical type-setting in Latex), presentation development and experience, and opportunities for students on diverse projects to interact. During the first semester, each student will make an initial presentation of the aims, ideas and possible research directions in the project, and a second presentation later on summarising progress. In the second semester, a further interim progress report presentation will be followed in late semester by a final report presentation.

Prerequisites:
Students must be working on statistical research with a Statistical Science faculty member. This pre-supposes relevant advanced course work in statistics and related areas. Students must have prior courses to the level of at least STA 121 & 122, as well as practical computing experience.

Credit: 1 unit for STA 190S(A) in fall and 1 unit for STA 190(B)S in spring.

Planning for interested students:
Contact me via email for general information and guidance on topics/faculty mentors, and explore the personal web pages of the Statistical Science faculty to get the flavor of their current research activities. Each professor has also provided one (or more) example topic, below. Students should contact professors directly for discussion and further information.

Important: Please note that students sign-up fast with available professors. Some professors will typically become committed quickly so you should make sure to explore options and sign-up soon! See "Available/Potential Project Topics" in the table below. And of course professors are interested in hearing about your own project ideas!

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Available/Potential Project Topics	Professor
(1) Agent-based models   (2) Bayesian game theory   (3) Metabolomics	David Banks
(1) Incorrect use of p-values for testing precise hypotheses   (2) Imprecise probabilities versus full probabilistic modeling   (3) Do Bayes factors help to mitigate the effect of model bias?	Jim Berger
(1) Statistics education   (2) Analysis of spatial data   (3) Small area estimation   (4) Hierarchical models	Mine Cetinkaya-Rundell
(1) Forest responses to global change-exchange of water, CO2, and energy   (2) Impact of co-infection of multiple pathogens on multiple hosts   (3) Inference on demography and health of natural populations	James Clark
(1) Model uncertainty in statistics   (2) Applications in neuroscience, astronomy, environmental statistics	Merlise Clyde
Statistical models for studying exposure disease relationships	David Dunson
(1) Modelling and analysis for spatial data   (2) Statistics in environmental policy studies   (3) Statistics for ecological processes	Alan Gelfand
Bayesian networks and computational biology	Alex Hartemink
Statistical genetics	Elizabeth Hauser
Statistical problems in genetics and cancer risk assessment	Ed Iversen
(1) Bayesian variable selection in genome-wide association studies   (2) Causal inference in observational studies	Fan Li
(1) Designing randomized experiments   (2) Causal inference from observational studies   (3) Applications in education or psychology   (4) Bayesian election forecasting	Kari Lock
Statistical genomics	Joe Lucas
(1) Nonparametric inference on high dimensional distributions   (2) Statistical genetics/genetic epidemiology	Li Ma
Probability and statistics on networks	Jonathan Mattingley
(1) Statistics and genomics   (2) Statistical machine learning	Sayan Mukherjee
(1) Statistics in policy and government: Data confidentiality   (2) Methods for handling missing data	Jerry Reiter
(1) Statistical estimation in scientific models: biology, chemistry, and physics   (2) Statistics in finance and decision making/portfolio theory   (3) Simulation and statistical inference for SDEs	Scott Schmidler (on leave--not available)
(1) Statistical methods in clinical trials   (2) Meta-analysis (combining information from many studies)   (3) Applied decision theoretic statistics   (4) Statistics education	Dalene Stangl
(1) Nonparametric statistics   (2) Statistics in the neurosciences   (3) Counting missing hurricanes	Surya Tokdar
(1) Time series and financial applications   (2) Time series and neuroscience applications   (3) Graphs and graph theory in statistics	Mike West
(1) Heavy-tailed distributions and statistical extremes   (2) Spatial statistics and random fields	Robert Wolpert

    Additional information:

• Students interested in research in statistical science and its applications should consider taking a relevant sequence of undergraduate courses.
• A one-year research project, developed under the mentorship of a StatSci faculty member and coupled with registration for STA 190S, is a requirement for the Major in Statistical Science.
• STA 190S as an elective counts towards the requirements for the Minor in Statistical Science.