Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, Nov 18 , via ZOOM

Data & Market Analyst Internship at Cytilife, Inc Stephen Masha
I had an opportunity to work as an intern with Cytilife, Inc as a Data & Market Analyst this past summer. During this period, I conducted research on wearables that was crucial to acquiring data, retrieved and cleaned data from the database, modeled data, and conducted a market analysis for a new app, and offered business‐to‐business support. My internship was not limited to just data science tasks. In this presentation, I will take you through my internship experience and other opportunities at Cytilife, Inc.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, Nov 4 , via ZOOM

2020 Summer Internship at U.S. Bank Sarah Lauwagie
I will be talking about my 2020 Summer Internship at U.S. Bank as a Business Analyst on the Mortgage Development and Support team. During my time there, I worked with the Mortgage IVR system and analyzed its process maps. I found areas for improvement and presented them to the business line with approval to move forward. Also, I had the opportunity to participate in a case competition with 91 teams regarding marketing to Millennials.

Dr. Kerby Awarded NSF Grant to Support Statistics and Data Science Education

Dr. April Kerby, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Winona State University, has been named as a co-principal investigator on a $600,000, three-year National Science Foundation grant supporting the Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science (MASDER) project.

With the ever-growing demand for professionals with the necessary skills to turn data into knowledge, statistics and data science have become two of the fastest growing fields worldwide, with a high demand in the U.S. specifically. Understanding students’ attitudes towards these subjects can be crucial for developing effective pedagogies in these areas and inspiring students to pursue a career in these fields.

MASDER will create a family of instruments in both statistics and data science to measure teaching and learning through data collected about students and instructors, in addition to the learning environment.  These instruments, which Kerby hopes will become a “go to” resource for assessing students’ attitudes towards statistics and data science, will be publicly available to instructors and researchers to help inform their teaching and improve those attitudes.

Kerby looks forward to involving undergraduate students in the project and is excited for what they will be able to contribute as well as gain from the experience. “I hope that students will get to utilize their programming skills to help us create customizable reports which will be available to the instructors who have their students take the survey.”

During her time at Winona State University, Dr. Kerby has helped create the undergraduate Data Science program, one of the first in the Midwest.  Her research has primarily focused on students’ attitudes towards statistics in relation to introducing a “Problem of the Week” into the introductory statistics course and she has published her findings in the Statistics Education Research Journal.

Source

2020-2021 Distinguished Lecturer in Mathematics and Statistics

Dr. Lisette de Pillis

Harvey Mudd College

Mathematical Medicine:  Modeling Disease and Treatment

Abstract:  Immune system dynamics have proven to play an increasingly central role in the development of new treatment strategies for immune-related diseases such as type 1 diabetes and certain cancers.  The critical importance of the immune system in fighting such diseases has been verified clinically, as well as through mathematical models.  Many open questions remain, however, including what may lead to non-uniform patient responses to treatments, and how to optimize and personalize therapy strategies.  Mathematical models can help to provide insights into the mechanisms that may be influencing patient outcomes.  In this talk, we will present a sampling of mathematical models that help us to simulate immune system interactions, disease dynamics, and treatment approaches that may slow, or even stop, disease progression.

Wednesday, October 28^th,
12:00—12:50 pm via Zoom

Student Capstone Presentation

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, June 3, via ZOOM
(contact Dr. Malone for Zoom link)

NFL Rushing Analytics Aaron Augustine
For my project, I studied various predictors that influence rushing yards in the National Football League. I used Random Forests to predict the number of yards gained on a rushing play. I will talk about the steps I went through to clean and prepare the data, my model building processes, and some issues that I encountered along the way. Visualizations were constructed to further investigate some of the more important predictors in the model.

Dr. Hooks Awarded WSU Professor of the Year

Winona State University statistics and data science Professor Tisha L. Hooks has been selected as Professor of the Year.

The Professor of the Year designation is awarded annually by the WSU Student Senate on behalf of the student body. Students vote for a professor that goes above and beyond for their students. These professors serve as exemplars in being accommodating, accountable, engaging to students, making an effort to have their curriculum relevant to daily life, and aiming to make their courses affordable for students to participate in. This award is run through Student Senate, but it is voted and decided by all students.

A professor in the WSU Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Hooks has been teaching at Winona State since 2006. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and a PhD in Statistics from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

Hooks, who initially had no intention of teaching, heeded the call to the classroom during graduate school, and she has never looked back. “Showing students the value of statistics and helping them succeed – especially when they thought they couldn’t, was extremely fulfilling. It still is today.”

Initially taken by surprise, Hooks is honored and grateful to have been chosen among “so many gifted teachers across campus…we pour so much of ourselves into our jobs as educators, and though we don’t expect to be recognized for our efforts, hearing that we have made a difference certainly helps to fill us back up again.”

Hooks honors the collective experience and professional collaboration of her WSU colleagues, with special thanks to her fellow statisticians and data scientists, saying “They are continually striving for excellence, which also pushes me to be the best teacher I can be. Together we have spent countless hours developing a curriculum that is relevant, engaging, and effective.”

“This award is special to me because it comes from the students, confirmation that I am helping students in the ways I had hoped when I changed my career path years ago. I just feel lucky to be a part of it all.”

Source

Student Capstone Presentation

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, April 29, via ZOOM
(contact Dr. Kerby for Zoom link)

Implementing SQL for Table Toolz, Project Structures for Data Science Daniel Lew
I will be talking about implementing SQL for Tabletoolz, which is a data manipulation library inspired by R’s Dplyr in Python, what I did and what I learned from the project. Also, I will be sharing about using a project structure for data science.