This award provides continued support for a successful 10-week summer REU site within the Statistics Department at Rice University for the study of Statistics and its applications. As the number of domestic graduate students in the Mathematical Sciences continues to decline, there is a critical need to develop human resources to continue supporting the United States' advantage in the world of science and technology. The Rice University Summer Institute of Statistics (RUSIS), now in its 10th year and fourth funding cycle, has been successful in encouraging students to pursue graduate degrees in Mathematics and Statistics. Roughly 85% of the students who have attended RUSIS and have graduated, are now doctoral students in Ph.D. programs around the country, and roughly 61% of them are members of underrepresented populations in Mathematics. RUSIS has accomplished this through intensive courses, close supervision of research projects, and visits to various research institutes and agencies in Houston.
The program will train and mentor 12 (7 NSF- and 5 NSA-supported) selected underrepresented minority students and students with no easy access to a research experience at their institution, including community college students, through intensive core courses in probability, stochastic processes, and statistical inference, with special emphasis on areas of current interest; e.g. multiple comparisons, extreme value theory, multivariate survival analysis, risk-reliability-sustainability of complex infrastructure systems, artificial intelligence, statistical learning, statistical genetics, and general biostatistics. The RUSIS engages the students in research projects under close collaboration with faculty mentors, and with the objective of producing joint publications, when the summer work merits it. Students present their results at national meetings and they are mentored in the preparation and presentation of their talks. In addition, students meet with an advisory committee composed of top scientists and present their work to them. The RUSIS also teaches short courses on the use of Unix platforms, LaTeX, and software to be utilized for research purposes such as Mathematica, Splus and/or R, and Matlab. In addition, the program organizes student and faculty visits to scientific facilities (e.g., Biomathematics and Biostatistics at MD Anderson Cancer Center, NASA). Through informal meetings, the program discusses a variety of topics ranging from applying to Graduate School to career experiences by outstanding scientists, and discussion of cutting-edge topics in Statistics. The program evaluates and monitors the progress of students for seven years (expected time for them to finish graduate school) after their participation, and an annual evaluation of the program by the participating students and an external advisory committee is an integral and valuable part of the program. The investment is starting to produce concrete results. The first RUSIS alumnus received his Ph.D. during the summer of 2011 and is now an assistant professor of statistical sciences in a Ph.D. program. Several more are due to obtain their PhDs in the next few years.
