Life by the numbers
Through power grids and body mass, institute gives undergrads real-world look at statistics

BY MIKE WILLIAMS

Rice News staff

Every summer, students show up at Rice not quite sure what to do with their lives.

But when they leave, they’re thinking statistics.

That’s the point, said Javier Rojo, the driving force behind the Rice University Summer Institute of Statistics (RUSIS), which brings a group of undergraduates from all over the country to campus for 10 weeks every summer for an intensive introduction to the possibilities of a career in statistics.

	JAVIER ROJO

“As part of exposing students to careers in statistics, we bring students to places like NASA and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where they meet statisticians who describe what they do,” said Rojo, who recently welcomed his seventh group of 17 students to Rice for the summer.

“Every year, M.D. Anderson has four or five biostatisticians talk to my students about their jobs. Some of them do applied work, some are more theoretical, but they’re all dealing with cancer research and consulting with doctors.

“The students come away saying, ‘Wow! We didn’t know statisticians could do these things.'”

Bioinformatics is just one of the fields showing an increased need for statisticians, said Rojo, a professor of statistics at Rice and director of the program who specializes in nonparametric statistics, survival analysis, reliability theory, extreme value theory, decision theory, dimension reduction and partial orders of probability distributions.

Summer Institute of Statistics
Learn more about the program that is inspiring students to pursue a career in statistics
Engineering solutions
Discover how Rice’s faculty is engineering careers for tomorrow’s leaders
The program recently earned another three years of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The National Security Agency (NSA) also provides funding. “Their motive is that the number of Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences in the United States hasn’t been rising as quickly as they’d like to see, and they’re very interested in enticing students to pursue graduate degrees,” Rojo said.

Classified as an REU, or Research Experiences for Undergraduates, the program offers more than dry textbook training. In the first four weeks, Rojo said students get intensive instruction in probability statistics, while lab work focuses on learning such professional tools as Matlab, Mathematica, the math publishing tool LaTeX and R, “which is the software statisticians who do research use these days,” he said. There are also field trips to conferences; one such trip took the entire class to El Salvador a few years ago, though a planned trip to Mexico this year was tripped up by fears of the swine flu.

Midway through the term, students are thrown headlong into their own research projects, which may depend to some degree on whom Rojo brings in as visiting professors. One year, neural network expert Raíl Rojas of the Free University of Berlin worked with students on a program for a robotic car, a project that made the semifinals of a competition held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

JEFF FITLOW Graduate student David Kahle views an overhead screen at Rice’s Symonds Lab, where students in the Rice University Summer Institute of Statistics are learning about the possibilities offered by a career in  statistics. Kahle himself studied with Rice professor Javier Rojo, right, during two summers in the program while an undergraduate at the University of Richmond in Virginia. He later returned to Rice to pursue his doctorate.

This year, Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, a Rice assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, will work with students on the probabilistic modeling of power grids.

Another group will work on recent research into body mass index and the impact it has on health. “The paper concludes that as the population becomes more obese, we’re going to produce more carbon dioxide, we’re going to need more food and so on. We want to see how robust their conclusions are,” Rojo said.

“The point is students get to understand that statistics is not just figuring out the median of a distribution, but actually has some interesting applications.”

Rojo said even though other REUs in statistics have popped up around the country in recent years (“They may actually create more competition for us, but I think it’s healthy”), he regularly receives about 70 applications for the 17 slots, most filled by college juniors and seniors but with a few younger students mixed in. The only academic requirement, he said, is that students have taken the calculus sequence of courses and linear algebra. “You want students to surpass a certain minimum of mathematical maturity,” he said.

The program pays tuition, transportation to and from their home institutions and a percentage of housing at the Rice Graduate Apartments, and students receive a stipend for food.

They must be U.S. citizens (an NSA requirement) or at least permanent residents (for NSF scholarships). “I get letters from international students in China and India and the United States saying they’ll pay their own way, but I have to turn them down,” Rojo said.

Students who make the grade tend to be from institutions where research opportunities are scarce, he said. Underrepresented minority students are highly encouraged to apply.

At the end of the summer, after weeks of preparation, students present their research projects to an advisory committee of nationally and internationally renowned scientists and mathematicians who are handpicked by Rojo and  visit Houston for a day to judge the students’ work. “I’ve had mathematicians say to me, ‘Is this the work of the students, or is that something that you …’ and I say, ‘No, I guide them, but it’s their work.’

“When we started the program, some people advised me against it because they said it would take up my whole summer,” he said. “But it’s so satisfying to see these young people grow. I wish we could do this year-round.”