What does it take for humans to learn how machines learn?  By Thomas Jilk First, a firm understanding of statistics and computing is required, as Statistics Teaching Faculty John Gillett knows. He brings that understanding — along with healthy doses of humor and humility — to his courses, where he shapes how thousands of UW–Madison students first encounter machine learning.  “It turns out I’m a good …

Michael Harding‘s path to graduate school didn’t follow a linear model. After earning mathematics and statistics degrees from Boston University, he landed at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania for a stint as a data scientist, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building disease models to predict case surges, he found himself diving deeper into the research literature, an …

By Thomas Jilk Today, even a single NFL game generates a staggering amount of data: Ten times per second, the league tracks the location, speed, and acceleration of every player on the field. Multiply that times 272 to account for all regular-season games, and the NFL has a gold mine for coaches and analysts seeking …

For Ben Lukszys x’26, a new business should be “a vessel to do good in the world, not just extract value.” A senior triple-majoring in Data Science, Entrepreneurship, and Philosophy, Lukszys has held a deep interest in the world of startups since he was a teenager. As a student at UW–Madison, he has spent the …

Three new faculty members have joined the Department of Statistics for the fall 2025 semester, reflecting the department’s rapid growth and increasing its teaching and research capacity around critical topics in statistics and data science. Bikram Karmakar, Xiao Luo and Maja Waldron come on board as the department transitions to its state-of-the-art new home, Morgridge …