Master of Science in Statistics
- Fall January 10
- Spring August 10
- Pullman: Yes
- 600 TOEFL Minimum score
- 80 TOEFLI Minimum score
- 7 IELTS Minimum score
Degree Description:
The degree program has two option areas: applied and theoretical. Courses are chosen from four field areas: *Advanced Theory and Stochastic Processes, *Linear Models and Multivariate Analysis, *Data Analysis, *and Econometrics and Time Series. For both options, the core requirements include Stat 443, 512, 530, 533, 556, at least one course in statistical computing, and a minimum of two credit hours of statistical consulting (Stat 590) spread over two semesters. The remainder of the 30 hours must include a total of at least 3 courses from 2 field areas, chosen from the following: *Advanced Theory and Stochastic Processes: Stat 542, 544, 548, or 549. *Linear Models and Multivariate Analysis: Stat 519, 520, 535. *Data Analysis: Stat 422, 428, 513, 514, 515, 518, 536, 547, 555, 572, or 573. *Econometrics and Time Series: Stat 516, 531, 552, 555, or 586. The final Master’s oral exam is a two-hour oral exam conducted by the student’s M.S. committee. The oral exam will consist of (i) a 30-minute presentation of the student’s Master’s project, (ii) a 15-minute period following the Master’s project presentation for questions by the committee related to the results contained in the Master’s project, and, (iii) a 75-minute period devoted to a comprehensive oral exam covering the material in Stat 443, Stat 512, Stat 530, Stat 533, Stat 556 as well as material covered in additional course work. The student is expected to be thoroughly familiar with a wide array of statistical concepts as contained in the list of topics and concepts obtained from the department.
Admission Requirements:
Prerequisites for admission include courses in Calculus, Linear Algebra, Computer Programming, and Statistical Methods. Analysis and Advanced Linear Algebra is recommended, as well as additional statistics classes.
For international students, either a TOEFL or IETLS score is required; recommended TOEFL score of 100 and IELTS of 7. Exceptions can be found here: https://gradschool.wsu.edu/international-requirements/
The application will require:
- Unofficial transcripts from all previous institutions.
- GPA above a 3.0 on a 4.0 scale.
- Resume/cv.
- Email contact information for 3 references.
- Personal statement. The personal statement is your chance to highlight relevant experiences and discuss your future research interests.
- GRE scores are not required but encouraged.
Unfortunately, graduate assistantships with the Department of Math and Stats are unavailable for Master’s students, and accepted students will normally be required to pay tuition to WSU.
Student Learning Outcomes:
All graduates will be able to:
- Problem solving skills: Students are expected to learn the fundamental tools of statistical modeling and implementation. Skills for identifying and solving statistical problems arising in various interdisciplinary areas is an important expected learning outcome associated with this degree.
- Ability to work individually or in groups: Statistical modeling can be pursued at an individual level or as part of a group effort with the group comprised of experts in various allied fields.
- The students are expected to develop such skills so that modeling and analysis gets done in a timely and efficient manner.
- Communication skills: Good communication skills are expected so that students can present in an effective manner the interpretation, as well as implications of the results obtained from a statistical model and its analysis.
Career Opportunities:
Opportunities for individuals trained in statistics abound in business, industry, government and academia.
Career Placements:
Pharmacy, banking, credit card companies, consulting, government agencies, information management
Faculty Members:
(Bennethum), Lynn Schreyer
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Deterministic Modeling, PDEs, Continuum Mechanics.
Currently: Mathematically modeling porous media – any material consisting of a solid and one or more other phases, including swelling porous materials. Examples include clays (expansive soils), polymers (such as drug-delivery polymers and bio-polymers), and cell membranes.
Asaki, Thomas James, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Applied optimization, image and data analysis
Chen, Xiongzhi
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Simultaneous inference (including variable/model selection and multiple comparison) with applications in biology and pharmaceutical science
Latent variable models for high-dimensional data with applications in genomics and signal processing
Analysis of non-Euclidean data (such as networks, shapes, images and tensors)
Spectra of random matrices (including those of sample auto-correlation/auto-covariance matrices) with applications to inference on high-dimensional data
Statistical inference on stochastic differential equations (including those driven by fractional Brownian motions) with applications in finance, biology and geology
Cooper, Kevin Dale, Ph.D.
Serves as: co-chair of graduate committee
Cooper, Sandra Clement, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Mathematics Education, Rational Approximation, Continued Fractions
Dasgupta, Nairanjana, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Non-parametric Statistics, Multiple Comparisons, Comparison to Control, Logistic Distribution, Optimal Designs, Design of Experiments, Innovative Methods of Teaching Statistics, The history of statistics.
Dillon, Robert, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Mathematical modeling, mathematical biology, numerical partial differential equations, computational biofluids.
Dimitrov, Alexander, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Information-theoretic and probabilistic approaches to neural computing and cognitive processes, non-linear neuronal models, chaotic dynamical systems, non-linear signal processing and prediction, systems identification, neural-based intelligent agents. Bioinspired engineering.
Evans, Marc Alexander, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Estimation for multiple recapture models having heterogeneous captures, and inference for binary and multinomial responses from designed experiments with randomization restrictions.
Hall, William
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Mathematics Education: the teaching and learning of calculus; professional identity of preservice and in-service secondary mathematics teachers
Hudelson, Matthew G, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Combinatorics and Discrete Geometry, Random Algorithms
Jandhyala, Venkata Krishna, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Change-point problems for statistical models and their applications, Quality control, Environmental monitoring, Econometrics.
Johnson, Dean, Ph.D.
Serves as: co-chair or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Educational statistics.
Teaching of statistics.
Statistical consulting.
Item response theory.
Kaul, Abhishek
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
High dimensional change point regression models; computational statistics and statistical learning
Khapalov, Alexander, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Applied Analysis; Mathematical Control Theory for Linear and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations; Modeling, Wellposedness and Motion Capabilities for Swimming Phenomenon; Systems Theory: Controllability, Stabilization, Observability and Unique Continuation; Control of Power Systems.
Knott, Libby, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
K-16 mathematics education and professional development.
Krishnamoorthy, Bala, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Applied algebraic topology, computational geometry, geometric measure theory, discrete optimization, data science; applications in computational chemistry, life sciences, and biomedicine.
Lapin, Sergey, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Numerical modeling in many applied fields including (but not limited to) diagnosing and monitoring systemic disease, channel routing for flood forecasting, dynamic granular matter formation process, infectious disease epidemics, and simulation of fluid flow.
Li, Haijun, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Probability, Stochastic Processes, Risk Analysis.
Current Research: multivariate regular/rapid variation, cooperative games, copulas with graph structure
Liu, Sheng-Chi, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Number theory, automorphic forms and representation theory.
Manoranjan, Valipuram S, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Mathematical and computer modeling of nonlinear phenomena that arise in engineering and life sciences.
Problems of particular interest: Contaminant transport in groundwater, transdermal drug delivery, models in developmental biology, nonlinear waves (solitons); iterative methods with large convergence regions.
McDonald, Judith, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Matrix Analysis and Linear Algebra
Moore, Charles, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Analysis, Harmonic analysis, Partial Differential Equations, Probability Theory
New, Leslie, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
The use of hierarchical Bayesian state-space models to study species interactions with the environment and other species, including ecological modeling to investigate how changes in individual behavior, either anthropogenic or natural, can affect population dynamics.
Current research: estimating the impact of wind facilities on eagles in the US and the effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas in reducing the impacts of noise in whale habitat.
Panchenko, Alexander, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Data Science: feature extraction from networks, learning network dynamics from limited time-series, statistical inference on networks. Application areas to plant biology and neuroscience.
Dynamics of active particle systems and active materials: mathematics of robot swarms involving the analysis and simulation of self-organizing particle systems possessing some means of self-propulsion and decision-making capability.
Continuum theories of large particle systems: production of a continuum description of a large system of atoms or molecules (like a fluid) starting from the atomistic equations of motion for the particles (Sixth Hilbert Problem)
Pascual, Francis, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Engineering Reliability, Failure-Time Models and Data Analysis, Robust Designs in Accelerated Life Tests.
Schumaker, Mark F, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Models of respiratory and photosynthetic electron transport
Schwartz, Elissa, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
– Experimental and theoretical techniques to investigate mechanisms in virology, immunology, and infectious disease epidemiology
– Control of lentiviral infection, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV).
– Mathematical and computational models of viral dynamics with clinical and experimental data to elucidate the determinants of virus control and escape.
Slavit, David, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Teacher development, particularly in collaborative professional contexts, teacher understanding and instruction STEM schools, the ways in which K-12 students develop understandings of algebraic ideas, particularly mathematical functions, and educational technology.
Sottile, Matthew, Ph.D.
Serves as: member only of graduate committee
Research Interests
Agent-based models
Image processing
Complex systems
Graph algorithms
Scientific computing
Programming languages
Tsatsomeros, Michael, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Matrix theory, linear algebra and its applications
Vincent, Kimberly McGinley, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Collegiate and pre-service mathematics education.
Vixie, Kevin, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Geometric analysis and geometric measure theory, geometry and analysis in high dimensions, and data science. Examples include data driven advances in geometric measure theory, image analysis, regularity of minimizers, geometric analysis in metric measure spaces and graphs
Voulgarakis, Nikolaos, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Nanoscale modeling and simulation of soft biological systems and complex fluids. Applications areas: a) gene and drug delivery, b) cell membrane dynamics, and c) energy transfer in biomolecules.
Wang, Xueying, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Mathematical Biology: the mathematical analysis of deterministic and stochastic dynamics.
Current applications include synaptic noise, channel noise of a single neuron and coupled neurons, clustering and plasticity of neural networks, transmission dynamics of infectious diseases such as cholera and Ebola, and TrojanY-Chromosome eradication strategy of an invasive species.
Wang, Yuan, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Statistical learning of complex data objects including tree, curves and images
Bayesian variable selection
Adaptive clinical trial design
Compressive sensing and system design
Yin, Hong-Ming, Ph.D.
Serves as: chair, co-chair, or member of graduate committee
Research Interests
Financial Engineering and Portfolio Management; Applied Mathematics; Partial Differential Equations, Inverse and Ill-posed problems; Electromagnetic Fields and Semiconductor/Superconductor modeling.