This proposal describes plans for the 14th Meeting of New Researchers in Statistics and Probability, a conference series sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), to be organized by and held for junior researchers. The primary objective is to provide a much needed venue for interaction among new researchers. The proposed meeting will take place over three days, July 26-28, 2012, at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. The meeting will be held immediately preceding the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in downtown San Diego. Participants will be statisticians and probabilists who have received their Ph.D. within the past five years or are expecting to receive their degree within the same year. Each participant will present a talk or poster. Topics will cover a variety of areas in statistics and probability, from theory and methods to applications. Senior speakers will give plenary talks for inspiration and other senior researchers will take part in discussion panels covering topics of importance for young people embarking on an academic/research career, such as teaching, mentoring, publishing and funding.
This conference series is explicitly aimed at training the future leaders and workers in statistics and probability. In helping to create networks of new researchers, it lays the groundwork for future collaboration and the informal exchange of ideas and knowledge. It is also critical for professional cohesion, which is particularly important as research fields become more and more specialized. Meeting people outside of one's research specialty area, and learning about their research, favors a more comprehensive view of research, which is important when taking editor positions and other professional service activities. The conference also attracts participants with different backgrounds and nationalities, and underrepresented groups --- women, minorities and people with disabilities --- are explicitly encouraged to attend. Conference website: www.math.ucsd.edu/~nrc2012/index.html
took place at the University of California, San Diego, July 26-28, 2012, just prior to the Joint Statistical Meetings, which took place in downtown San Diego. The meeting attracted young statisticians and probabilists from many areas of expertise. There were 67 junior participants, out of which 34 women --- including one African-American woman, one Hispanic woman and a woman with disabilities. About half of the participants gave a 15 minutes talk, and the other half presented a poster. All sessions were very well attended. The research spanned a large number of areas, and the talks were grouped in several sessions: applied statistics, computational biology, spatial statistics and image processing, bayesian statistics, machine learning, mathematical statistics, probability. In addition to these talks and poster sessions where the junior participants presented their research, 4 senior researchers, all very well-known in their specialty, gave plenary talks: Bin Yu, Jason Fine, Johnathan Taylor and Yuval Peres. There were also discussion panels on the major aspects of research and academic careers. The panel on publishing was lead by Peter Hall and Susan Paddock; the panel on teaching by Rob Gould and Jason Schweinsberg; the panel on mentoring by Jason Fine, Marina Vannucci and Ruth Williams; and the panel on funding by representatives from various agencies: Nandini Kannan and Gábor Székely (NSF), Michelle Dunn (NIH), Floyd "Ben" Cole III (NSA), and also Tim Hesterberg (Google). The PI received many emails from participants claiming this had been one of the best meetings they had attended. The PI attributes this to the sense of camaraderie that such meetings generate, and the sense of easy relating among researchers in the same age group. This is a core purpose of this meeting series. Almost all the funds that were granted by the NSF were used to support the junior participants and senior participants. Other expenses included buying poster stands and boards (much cheaper than renting them). The senior participants often took on themselves to pay for their airfare, meaning they charged this on their research grants, as they were attending the JSM after the meeting. The junior participants were reimbursed for their room and board on campus ($440 per participants). A number found funding elsewhere and did not claim any reimbursement, to our surprise, so that there is a fair amount of funds left.
