Teaching activities

Course Creation and Teaching Activities

After returning to the Universidad Simon Bolivar Venezuela in 1981, I started the teaching the graduate programs and consulting in Statistics: Founding Director of the Statistical Lab and Founding Coordinator of the Master in Statistics and the Statistics track inside the PhD in Engineering. This involved creation of over 5 courses in Probability and Statistics.

In 1989 I wrote a graduate monograph(public domain) entitled "Analisis de Decision, Inferencia y Prediccion Estadistica Bayesiana". The _rst edition of the monograph (the first of its type in Spanish) was given in a national course in Venezuela in 1989.The second edition was given as a Latinamerican course in Mexico 1980. Thereafter, the third edition, has been the basis for several courses: Madrid, Medellin, Costa Rica etc. This is the basis, of a core course in PR about Decision Analysis.

In 2001 I was selected as Chair of the Mathematics Department and Professor of Statistics by the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras in San Juan, College of Natural Sciences. As such I had the responsibility to launch the newly created PhD in Mathematics. The PhD has 3 options: Analysis, Discrete and Computational Mathematics and Statistics. I stayed 6 years as Head and thereafter I have been Director of the Bio-Statistics and Bio-Informatics Center of the College of Natural Sciences. During this period, we created several courses and taught them so that as to prepare the graduation of a cohort of Masters and PhD students. Courses included:

• Revamping the upper division Probability and Statistics, general Probability and Statistics course for science majors; Graduate courses: Decision Analysis and Bayesian Statistics, Data Analysis and Experimental Design, Computational Statistics, Times Series and Forecasting, Linear and Generalized Linear Models, Applied Stochastic Processes,etc. Emphasis has been in integrating computational languages for programming with data (usually R) with interpretation and statistical theory.
• Creation of new course for the whole system of Campus of the UPR, but located in Medical Sciences: "Data Analysis for Cancer Research", given jointly with Drs. Maria Eglee Perez and Humberto Ortiz, using R and Bioconductor.
• Big-Data: two undergraduate courses has been created in the context of the grant IDI-BD2K: one in "Statistical Analyses of Massive Biomedical Data" (BBD1) and a second course in "Multivariate Analysis of Massive Data" (BBD2).

PI or Co-PI of three educational grants: two STEM and IDI-BD2K.(See below).