The Research for Undergraduates Summer Institute of Statistics at Oregon State University in Corvallis (RUSIS @OSU) recruits 15 (5 supported by NSA and 10 supported by NSF) selected underrepresented minority students and students with no easy access to a research experience at their institutions, including students from Community Colleges, Tribal Colleges, Historically Black Colleges (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI’s), with the specific goal of mentoring and training them for careers in research in the mathematical sciences and more specifically in Statistics. Through an intensive short course in probability and statistics, an intensive seminar in computation, and close mentoring and supervision by faculty directing research projects, the students develop skills that will help them during graduate school and their graduate research stages. By the end of the summer all students had participated in at least one research project – analyzing data, running computer simulations, and developing algorithms, and when appropriate engaging in theoretical work. Every student will be encouraged and expected to prepare their research findings in close collaboration with their faculty mentors and peers for presentation in student sessions at national meetings. In cases where the work is sufficiently advanced, students and faculty will discuss continuing the projects after the program ends with the goal of fully developing the work for submission and possible eventual publication. Motivated by current interest in the development of new methodologies to respond to needs in high dimensional data analyses, research projects will be selected from areas of current applied and theoretical interest (e.g. multiple comparisons, dimension reduction, random matrices, extreme value theory, multivariate survival analysis, statistical genetics, massive data methodologies, and modeling of the power grid and other complex urban infrastructures).

The RUSIS @OSU is a continuation of the successful RUSIS held at Rice University from 2003-2013. The program moved to the University of Nevada at Reno for the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016. In the summer of 2017, the RUSIS program took place, for the first time, at Oregon State University. The same guiding principles that propelled RUSIS to become a model for REU’s in statistics, and worthy of the American Mathematical Society’s award for Programs That Make a Difference in 2014 – see Jackson (2014) -- continue to form the foundation that guides the new RUSIS located at OSU.

The previous students have work on four different projects:

1. The impact of obesity on the environment and factors associated with diabetes
2. Random Projections as reduction dimension tools
3. Points over threshold analysis of environmental pollution in Houston, Tx
4. Testing for second order stochastic dominance and applications to portfolio selection

The Institutions represented in RUSIS at OSU 2017 are as follows:

• Texas State University – San Marcos
• Trinity University – San Antonio
• University of Texas – El Paso
• Cal State – Fresno
• Cal State – Bakersfield
• Cal State – Fullerton
• University of Arizona – Tucson
• Occidental College – Los Angeles
• University of Nevada – Reno