Department of Statistics History
The Department of Statistics at Penn State was created on July 1, 1968, with James B. Bartoo serving as the inaugural department head. Initial moves towards a Department of Statistics actually began more than a decade previously, in early 1957. At that point, there was a proposal from the now defunct Penn State chapter of the American Statistical Association for a statistical consulting center. At the end of 1962, a committee appointed by the vice president for resident education pointed to the need for a statistics department on campus.
Bartoo was the first doctorate-level statistician hired by Penn State, in 1952, as a member of the Department of Mathematics. Another statistician, William Harkness, was hired as an assistant professor of mathematics in 1959. In the early 1960s, graduate offerings in statistics were being developed and more statistics faculty were hired into the mathematics department, including G.P. Patil in 1964, Marllyn T. Boswell in 1965, Robert Hultquist in 1966, Thomas Hettmansperger in 1967, and Peter Dress, jointly with the University’s Department of Forestry, in 1967. These seven professors were the initial members of the statistics department.
In 1969, the department hired a probabilist, Thomas A. Ryan Jr., who soon developed a keen interest in computing. In 1971, Brian Joiner was recruited to Penn State, bringing with him a user-friendly computer package called Omnitab. While Omnitab was user friendly, it was too large, by the standard of the day, to be practical for student use. Ryan and Joiner teamed up and, along with Barbara Ryan, created Minitab, which was both easy to use and versatile enough to run on a variety of computers. Their efforts resulted in Minitab being one of the most widely used statistical software packages for undergraduate instruction as well as for quality and continuous improvement.
Penn State’s statistics department is renowned for its world-class research faculty, including C.R. Rao, known for the Cramer-Rao lower bound, among other foundational results. Rao directed the Center for Multivariate Analysis at Penn State from 1988 until his retirement in 2001 and was the first chaired professor in the department, holding the endowed Eberly Family Chair until his retirement. The Eberly Family Chair was later held by Bruce Lindsay, recognized for his research on composite likelihood and mixture models, and is currently held by Runze Li, whose highly cited work on variable selection, high-dimensional data, and nonparametric modeling have helped continue the department’s long tradition of leadership in statistics research. The field of astrostatistics was created at Penn State through the collaboration of statistics professor Jogesh Babu and astronomy and astrophysics professor Eric Feigelson. Penn State statisticians have made influential contributions in numerous areas, including mixture models, dimension reduction, composite likelihood, network modeling, minorization-maximization (MM) algorithms, and image analysis. Historical strengths in theoretical and computational statistics have been enhanced by serious collaborations in a wide range of applied areas, including genomics, education, neuroscience, social sciences, infectious disease, and atmospheric sciences. Throughout its history, the department has been known for its collegial and intellectually stimulating environment and its focus on educating and mentoring the next generation of statisticians and scientists. Alumni of our undergraduate and graduate programs occupy high-impact roles in academia, industry, and government.
Department of Statistics Leadership Since 1968
James B. Bartoo 1968–1969
William L. Harkness 1969–1987
Thomas P. Hettmansperger 1988–1990
James L. Rosenberger 1990–2006
Bruce Lindsay 2006–2012
David R. Hunter 2012–2018
Murali Haran 2018–2024
Nicole A. Lazar 2024–