About

Our undergraduate program is one of the oldest in the country. The program focuses on giving students training in applications and theory. We provide a wide range of courses that allow students to focus on areas such as computational statistics, industrial statistics or actuarial science. We prepare our students to be competitive in the job market and graduate school.

Our graduate program has strengths in industrial, computational, data analytics, applied and traditional statistics. We offer a focus on environmental statistics and biostatistics. Most of our graduate students have assistantships that allow them to develop skills as statistical collaborators or teachers. Our program is strengthened by two programs - the Corporate Partners program and our statistical collaboration program.

Faculty members are active in a wide variety of both statistical and interdisciplinary research collaborations producing 75 publications in 2014. Statistical research interests range from experimental design, reliability theory, and regression analysis to data visualization, bioinformatics, data analytics, and Bayesian methodology. The department has a well-rounded mix of frequentist and Bayesian statisticians. Our faculty members work in cooperation with the Social Decision Analytics Laboratory (SDAL), Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, and Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute as well as with numerous other departments. Faculty members work on many funded research projects.

Our active Corporate Partners Program allows faculty and students to interact with corporations (including American Credit Acceptance, Capital One, Eastman, DuPont, Eli Lilly, General Electric, Gore, Eli Lilly, Minitab, and SAS). Our corporate collaborators provide support through internships, training and research with faculty and students. Our annual meeting allows interaction with statisticians from leading companies.

The department offers unique opportunities for our students and a valuable service to the Virginia Tech community through our collaboration program. The program's mission is to support faculty, students and staff at Virginia Tech and to train statistics students to become interdisciplinary collaborators. Projects allow our students to directly participate in research through data analysis, design of experiments and interactions with prominent researchers and graduate students. Our students are sought after by major companies throughout the United States.

The department is growing and currently has 29 full time faculty and staff members, 103 undergraduate majors, 53 undergraduate minors, 62 Actuarial Science minors, and 79 graduate students.