The Department of Statistics has openings for a Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Professor. Applications are accepted via the University of Chicago's Academic Career Opportunities employment site.

Rina Foygel discusses graduate student research in an interview in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Inquiry.

The Scientific and Statistical Computing Seminars, are held at 3:30 PM on Fridays in Eckhart 133.

Peter Bühlmann of ETH Zürich will be the speaker for the annual Bahadur Memorial Lectures to be held on April 16 and 17, 2012.

S. R. S. Varadhan of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University will be giving the first Patrick Billingsley Lecture on Thursday, May 31, 2012. More information to come.

Prof. Dan Nicolae is co-chair of a national asthma genetics consortium that released first findings, published in Nature Genetics, identifying an asthma susceptibility gene variant specific to African-Americans.

We are pleased to congratulate Michael L. Stein, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor, for receiving a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching this year. The award is given annually each Spring to full-time faculty in the divisions who exemplify the highest teaching standards and are nominated for distinction by their students and home department. Congratulations and thanks to Mike for his years of service to our students and department.

The Department welcomed the Year of the Dragon with our annual Lunar New Year luncheon on Tuesday, January 24. Dragon is written as "龙" in simplified Chinese and "龍" in traditional Chinese and pronounced as "loong." In several traditional Asian cultures, it is a revered mythological creature believed to live deep in the sea and high in the sky. Thank you to our wonderful student organizers for a festive and tasty event!

MONDAY, January 30, 2012, at 4:00PM, in Eckhart 133, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Statistics Colloquium
SERGIO BACALLADO, Biophysics Group, Stanford University
"Bayesian Analysis of Reversible Markov Chains with Applications to Molecular Dynamics"

THURSDAY, February 2, 2012, at 12:00PM, in Eckhart 110, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Statistics Colloquium
LISA LENDWAY, Department of Statistics, University of Minnesota
"Using the Bootstrap to Teach Confidence Intervals in an Introductory Statistics Course"

FRIDAY, February 3, 2012, at 3:30PM, in Eckhart 133, 5734 S. University Avenue.
Scientific and Statistical Computing Seminar
ANIL HIRANI, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Hodge Decomposition: Applications and Numerics"