Statistics

Statistics’ Rojo exposes undergraduates to research

BY ANN LUGG
Special to the Rice News

Javier Rojo, professor of statistics, is a man with a mission. Rojo recruits undergraduates from around the country to come to Rice for the Rice University Summer Institute for Statistics (RUSIS), an intensive 10-week introduction to statistics and statistics research.

“My goal is to orient these students to research,” he said.

Many of the students do not yet know what they will do after graduation, but quite a few have written Rojo after attending RUSIS saying they decided to attend graduate school, many in statistics. “Several have applied to the graduate program in statistics at Rice and some have been accepted,” he said.

Most of the students already have backgrounds in the mathematical sciences. At Rice, they experience an intensive introduction to statistics, beginning with three weeks in the classroom. Guest lecturers introduce the students to different applications of statistics, such as biostatistics, extreme value theory and survival analysis, giving them enough information to do group research projects.

At the end of the 10 weeks, the students present their research to the RUSIS advisory committee, which is made up of faculty from the University of Arizona, the University of Colorado–Denver, Georgia Tech and Rice. Several students have gone on to present their research results at national conferences. Rojo helps those students cover travel expenses to the conferences.

All of the students receive a $3,500 stipend, $700 for living expenses and travel expenses for the 10 weeks at Rice. “They don’t have much free time,” Rojo said, “We do take them to NASA, where they fly the shuttle simulator, and to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where they meet researchers whose work involves a lot of statistics.”

RUSIS is supported by a Research Experience for Undergraduates grant from the National Science Foundation. Rojo receives additional support for the workshop from the National Security Agency.

—Ann Lugg is the senior department administrator and editor in the office of the dean of engineering.