Arts & Sciences has recently announced the creation of a new department of Statistics and Data Science.  According to Feng Sheng Hu, dean of Arts & Sciences, the hope is to build a world-class department with outstanding scholars who will transform the university intellectual community not only through their own activities and achievements but also through synergistic collaborations with existing faculty and departments across Arts & Sciences, the McKelvey School of Engineering, and all of the other schools at the university. To learn more, please read the full announcement. 

As a first step, a search is underway to identify the inaugural chair and a search committee has been appointed. The committee will be chaired by Aaron Bobick, Dean of James McKelvey School of Engineering, and staffed by Ebba Segerberg, Associate Dean and Chief of Staff. 

Faculty named to the committee are:

Aaron Bobick (Chair), Dean of James McKelvey School of Engineering, James M. McKelvey Professor
Jimin Ding, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics
Michael Esposito, Assistant Professor of Sociology
José E. Figueroa-López, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics
Abigail Jager, Senior Lecturer of Mathematics
Roch Guérin, Department Chair and Harold B. & Adelaide G. Welge Professor of Computer Science 
Soumendra Lahiri, Stanley A. Sawyer Professor in Mathematics and Statistics 
Philip Payne, Janet and Bernard Becker Professor and Director, Institute for Informatics (I2), Associate Dean for Health Information and Data Science and Chief Data Scientist for the School of Medicine
Betsy Sinclair, Professor of Political Science
Brett Wick, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Dean's Fellow for Digital Transformation