Professor Mahtash Esfandiari was selected as the winner of the Inaugural Physical Science Centennial Excellence in Education Award. This award recognizes a faculty member for making a broad impact on classroom inclusivity and learning excellence. As the primary architect and co-director of the capstone course, and pioneering the first diversity course in the division, Mahtash has demonstrated the ability to inspire collaboration, as well as making many contributions to help establish an inclusive learning community at UCLA.

We congratulate Mahtash for winning this award and thank her for the huge impact that she made in diversity education in the UCLA Department of Statistics.

Two teams of graduating seniors recently completed their Statistics capstone course. They did an outstanding job. They worked under the supervision of Professor Mahtash Esfandiari and Professor Vivian Lew. Samuel Baugh was their teaching assistant.

The first group produced a real-time updating dashboard app that tracks the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Using publicly available data from “Google Community Mobility Reports” and “The COVID Tracking Project”, the dashboard shows the behavior of citizen mobility and COVID-19 test and patient outcomes in different states for different time intervals. Please see their website and dashboard in action.

The students in this first team are Brielle Josephine Balswick, Adrika Chakraborty, Valerie Jiaying Chen, Shirley Mach, Josh (Jungsoo) Park, Julia Sho Sung, Cydney Joy Vicentina, Anika Vij and Jericho Neo Ranches Villareal.

The second group created a simulation dashboard app, using a SIRU epidemiological model for each state in the U.S. While accounting for potential unreported cases, this dashboard presents the spread of COVID-19 and its susceptibility to the implementation of government interference. They produced a video that explains the details.

The students in the second team are Keith Atienza, Isabela Devia, Valeria Monserrat Lopez Robles, Rachel Theresa Rusch, Michael Anthony Stranieri, Lucas (Yoo Jeong) Han, Jianzhen Wang, Yixin Xu and Fanru Zhao.

Professor Jingyi Jessica Li was interviewed by Robyn Williams on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Science Show”. She talked about “Genomic processes described using biology and statistics”. The podcast was broadcast on May 23, 2020. It is available here.

Professor Rob Gould has received the 2020 ASA Outstanding Chapter Service Award from the Southern California Chapter of ASA (SCASA). The award is for Rob’s “outstanding leadership, committed mentoring, innovative teaching and dedicated service to the Chapter. For never stopping thinking of new and innovative ways to bring Statistics and Data Science to the whole world, and for caring enough to entice the statistical community to spread the word”! Last year, Rob received the 2019 Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award from the ASA and the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education from the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics and Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.

Please congratulate Rob for winning another distinguished award!