Celebrating the Golden Jubilee of Graduate Statistics program

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The goal of this event is to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Graduate Statistics program at Ball State University and bring our alumni across the world together!

A Brief History of the Graduate Statistics Program

With a long history as an institution of higher education since 1919 in East Central Indiana the Indiana General Assembly renamed the Ball State College as Ball State University in 1965. During the very early years of Ball State University as a full-fledged university, the Department of Mathematical Sciences (at that time Department of Mathematics) hired in 1969 Dr. Mir Masoom Ali from Canada where he just completed the PhD degree in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Toronto, to teach courses in Statistics. Immediately after joining Dr. Ali realized that unless there was a statistics program, he would not belong to either the mathematics education or the mathematics programs which were the only two programs. So, he discussed the creation of a new graduate MA/MS program in statistics with the dean, chair, and the department faculty. Finally, the new graduate program in statistics was approved by the department, college, university and the State of Indiana. Dr. Ali developed the Master of Science and Master of Arts programs in Mathematical Statistics (later renamed just Statistics) along with almost all the courses which were finally approved in 1971. He was thus the Founder of the Graduate Statistics Programs at Ball State. In later years he had developed undergraduate program in Statistics as Option 2 of Mathematics which was later on relabeled as Option 2 Applied Mathematics. He single-handedly ran the Program as Director and taught almost all the courses in Statistics many times with non-paid overloads just to keep the program running and also to make it viable. After ten years of Dr. Ali’s joining the department the second statistician Dr. Dale Umbach was hired who also later became the chair of the department. This followed by the hiring of the statisticians Dr. Rebecca Pierce, Dr. Jay Andersen (who had left for Eli Lilly), Dr. Munni Begum, Dr. Rahmatullah Imon and Dr. Drew Lazar. Dr. Ali was very active in recruiting graduate students from within the country and from overseas. Dr. Ali realized early in his career that graduate programs in math and sciences will suffer from lack of American students and emphasized the idea of filling that void by bringing in international graduate students in the stat program and as such he started bringing in international students since 1972. In 2007 during Dr. Ali’s retirement Dr. Jo Anne Gora, President of Ball State wrote, “Your [Dr. Ali’s] tireless efforts of recruiting students have been critical to the success of the statistics program, and have contributed to internationalization of our campus community.” We can appreciate Dr. Ali’s vision of almost half a century ago as many of the math and sciences departments of big and small universities nationally will have difficulty in running their graduate programs today without international students.

Dr. Ali retired as George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences in 2007 after serving 50 years as a practicing and teaching statistician of which 38 years were rendered at Ball State. He has been the most published author in our department during his tenure at Ball State and also during his post-retirement years.Many of our former Statistics graduates successfully completed doctoral programs at such universities as Brown University, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, Iowa State University, University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, Indiana University, Oregon State University, Southern Methodist University, Bowling Green State University, Ohio State University, University of Connecticut, University of Cincinnati, University of Louisville, Marquette University, University of Illinois at Carbondale, University of South Carolina, and the University of Toronto, Canada. Our students in the graduate statistics program were hired by Eli Lilly in Indianapolis and other pharmaceutical industries, Ball Corporation, Wells Fargo in Ames, Iowa, IUPUI Medical Center in Indianapolis, Humana Health Services in Louisville, Blue Cross Blue Shield in Chicago, GlaxoSmithKline in Research Triangle Park, IBM in New York, and FDA, among many others. Also our former graduates are teaching at Ball State University, University of Pittsburgh, Central European University, Dhaka University in Bangladesh, Boston University, DePauw University, DePaul University and Eastern Michigan University, among others. Dr. Ali had supervised besides a number of Master’s theses, one Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) thesis which was the only doctoral thesis of our department.

The faculty members in our statistics program have published hundreds of papers, presented hundreds of papers as keynote, plenary, invited and contributed paper presenters. Dr. Ali had brought visiting professors from Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Korea to our department which has also enriched our statistics program. Dr. Ali organized several conferences at Ball State of which Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop (MBSW) has been the most lasting one which he had co-founded with Dr. Charles Sampson in 1978. It was held annually for forty years at Ball States bringing over 8,000 statisticians over the years which included many famous statisticians from such universities as Harvard University, Stanford University, Duke University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Purdue University, University of Chicago, North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of Edinburgh, Scotland, to name a few, most major and other pharmaceutical companies, US Government, Health Industries and several Presidents of American Statistical Association and Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Since 2016 the meeting moved to Indianapolis.The graduate statistics program has added new courses, revised its curriculum and kept up with the new developments of the field. One of the farsighted initiatives of Dr. Ali was to introduce computer in statistics courses when there was no laptop and students had to use the IBM punch cards to feed the information. He would teach course on unpaid overload basis where the students would use the problems from previous course in design of experiments which they had solved manually and would solve those problems now by using Minitab, BMDP, SPSS, and SAS. Thus, it was a pioneering initiative to introduce computing software packages during those early days of computer. Our program now uses many sophisticated statistical software packages in our courses. Our current graduate program in statistics is modern and more data oriented keeping up with the current developments in the field.

On this occasion of the Jubilee Anniversary of the statistics program in our department at Ball State, we thank all our students and faculty members who have been instrumental to this great success of this program over a period of 50 years. Finally, our special thanks go to Professor Mir Masoom Ali for his vision to establish the program and for his continued support and contributions to the success of the program.