The Ohio State University Department of Statistics was founded in 1974. In its first 25 years, the Department underwent remarkable growth and, by 1999, the Department had earned a national research and teaching reputation. By 1999, it consisted of 24 faculty members and 7 staff and a total of 495 graduate degrees had been conferred. Recollections about the early Department history up to 1999 are gathered in the 25th anniversary document “A Short History of Statistical Science at The Ohio State University” written by D. Ransom Whitney, Jagdish Rustagi, Thomas Santner, and H. N. Nagaraja. This can be found on the Department History page of the Department website.
The second 25 years of the department’s history, beginning 1999-2000 and ending 2023-2024, have been no less eventful. During the years 1999-2024, the Department continued to gain national and international visibility. Despite sporadic budget cuts, the Department’s national academic ranking steadily increased and had reached an academic ranking in the top 20 of national departments.
During its history, the Department has been led by outstanding chairs: D. Ransom Whitney (1974-79), Jagdish Rustagi (1979-83, 1984-88), Douglas Wolfe (1983-84), Prem Goel (1988-92), Thomas Santner (1992-96, 1997-2000), William Notz (1996-97), Douglas Wolfe (2000-08), Mark Berliner (2008-15), Steven MacEachern (2015-23), and Eloise Kaizar (2023-ongoing).
Additionally, during the second 25 years, the Department continued to hire excellent faculty and also added two joint hires (Kubatko with Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, and Sivakoff with Mathematics). As of 2024, the Department has 26 Statistics faculty members, plus a further 7 specialists in Teaching Practice (Table 1) despite a number of retirements of senior faculty and some loss of faculty who moved for personal reasons (Table 2). There are 9 staff dealing with administration, fiscal issues, and educational programs (Table 3), 7 part time lecturers, and roughly 80 graduate students.
In this 50th anniversary document, we present some of the highlights of the second quarter century of the Department. Many more details than can be included here are gathered in the departmental newsletters produced from 2000 to 2011, and which can be found on the Department History page of the Department website. Those newsletters give details of research projects, graduate student activities, awards, internships and degrees, as well as alumni news, among other topics. From 2012 to the present, the news has been given in individual articles on the Department home page under “Recent news” and “More News”. (Keep pressing the “Load More” button at the bottom of the “More News” page to go back in time.)
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank many faculty members, past and present (and especially Kate Calder, Noel Cressie, Yoon Lee, Steve MacEachern, and Elizabeth Stasny) for information and comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We thank Laura Kubatko for information on the MBI, and Brian Smith and Ryan Kilbane for information on the computing history.