Message From The Chair

Welcome to the home page of the Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics (AMS) at UCSC!

Faculty in AMS believe that the most interesting, important, and exciting problems today lie at the inte rsection of a question in engineering, medicine, or science, a model of that question based on process, and analysis of dat a that allows us to know if our answer is correct. We are all, thus, mathematical modelers. Statisticians are generally mor e interested in modeling the data themselves and applied mathematicians are more generally interested in modeling the biolog ical and physical processes leading to the data but we are ultimately interested in the seamless connection of the two. Mod ern developments - such as hierarchical modeling and which are computationally intensive-- makes this melding easier and ea sier, if you have the right brain power. Training that brain power - at every level from undergraduate to post-doctoral - i s our goal, with an emphasis on bringing the best possible methods of statistical and applied mathematical modeling to bear on important applied problems. Visit the individual web pages of faculty and you will see a dizzying array of tools and a w ide range of applications.

We are a young department - our founding Chair (David Draper) arrived only in January 2001. Our graduat e program in Statistics and Stochastic Modeling, with an annotation for Applied Mathematics, was approved in academic year 2006-07 and we graduated our first student, Anand Patil, in summer 2007. Thus, we are still growing and developing. This yea r, we expect to rename our graduate program in a way that gives statistics and applied mathematics equal emphasis in the ti tle. We are searching for a junior applied mathematician and welcome visitors.

Marc Mangel - Department Chair