9510511 Rocke Center for Statistics in Science and Technology Group Infrastructure Grant. The Center for Statistics in Science and Technology (CSST) is anewly-formed research and training center at U.C. Davis, whose purpose is to support and facilitate interdisciplinary research and graduate training involving statistics and related areas of mathematical sciences together with physical, biological, and earthsciences. The initial faculty membership includes statisticians, researchers in continuous and combinatorial optimization methods, and researchers from other scientific areas (Geology and Toxicology) in which there are existing collaborations. Other investigators will be included in the Center as it develops, and as its interdisciplinary activities increase. The establishment of CSST was prompted by the observation that, increasingly, successful attacks on scientific problems involve cooperation between investigators with different specializations. A particularly attractive type of collaboration is between mathematical scientists, and researchers in areas of application of mathematical methods. A major activity of the Center under this project will be to support graduate students in statistics and related areas of the mathematical sciences to work on interdisciplinary projects with geosciences, toxicology, and other scientific areas. This is important because the ability to work in such cross- disciplinary partnerships is an attribute highly valued both in university and industrial settings, and because the skills needed to contribute to such teams do not develop of themselves, but need to be consciously nurtured as a part of graduate education. Other activities of CSST under this project will be to conduct seminars and symposia, and provide a computational facility for cross-disciplinary research projects using equipment previously acquired with NSF and NIH support.
