The VIGRE program of the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University is designed to benefit the statistical sciences by bringing together working groups consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. The structure of the program will provide students with the opportunity to incorporate esearch and interdisciplinary problem solving into their educational experience at an early stage in the process. It will provide postdoctoral fellows experience and professional practice. And, it is designed to increase the level of interdisciplinary research opportunities for faculty, both across areas of research in statistics and mathematics, and across boundaries of the mathematical and applied sciences.
The core of the VIGRE program consists of work groups that focus on areas of statistical investigation and application. Work groups exist in the areas of Bioinformatics, Environmental and Ecological Statistics, Engineering Statistics, Probability and Mathematical Statistics, Sampling Methodology, and Statistics in the Social Sciences. Each work group will conduct research and write proposals for external funding of their activities, participate in the VIGRE workshop, work with others to plan undergraduate summer research experiences, and present research results at meetings and through publication outlets in both statistics and subject-oriented scientific journals. Many departments at Iowa State University have supported the VIGRE concept in the Department of Statistics, and involvement of researchers from a broad range of scientific disciplines in work group activities is expected to further increase the historical strength of applications and methodological development in statistics at Iowa State.
