Shaped by coursework, teaching and research.
Through advanced coursework, research training, and original dissertation work, students develop expertise in both technical systems and social analysis. The Ph.D. program includes teaching and research experiences to prepare scholars for academic and research careers.
Planning your curriculum.
Required courses and enrollment
While our program has standard course requirements, we recognize and value students' prior academic preparation. With approval from the Director of Graduate Studies, relevant graduate-level coursework from other institutions may fulfill specific requirements, allowing for customized academic paths.
General course requirements:
- STSCI 7170 Linear Models (Fall, Year 1)
- MATH 6710 Probability (Fall, Year 1)
- STSCI 7180 Generalized Linear Models (Spring, Year 1 or 2)
- STSCI 6520 Statistical Computing (Spring, Year 1 or 2)
- MATH 6720 Probability II or STSCI 6750 Probability II for Statisticians (Spring, Year 1)
- STSCI 6730 Theory of Statistics (Spring, Year 1)
- MATH 6740 Asymptotic Statistics (Fall, Year 2)
- BTRY 7950 Statistical Consulting (Fall, Year 2 or 3)
- BTRY 7951 Advanced Statistical Consulting (Spring, Year 2 or 3)
In addition, students are required to take 4-5 elective courses that will need to be approved by their Special Committee Chairperson.
Students should plan to pre-enroll whenever it is possible. Otherwise students should enroll in all courses during the open enrollment time at the beginning of each semester. It is the responsibility of each student to review their course enrollment and confirm it is correct prior to all enrollment deadlines.
Core course requirements should be completed prior to the A exam, unless an exception has been arranged with the Director of Graduate Studies.
If a student feels an alternative 6000 level or higher course meets our core course requirement in one of our areas, they may petition to enroll and receive credit for this alternative class. Students must submit a petition by doing the following:
- Email allenward [at] cornell.edu (Allen Award )and fill out the Ph.D. Core Course Petition at least 1 month prior to the first day of open enrollment. You will be required to upload the complete course description as it appears in the course roster, upload the current syllabus of the course in the petition, and indicate your reason for this petition.
- Email all these materials to the faculty area leads, copying the DGS and the GFA.
The faculty area leads will email the student, the Chairperson, and the GFA once a decision has been made on the petition. Students should not assume the petition will be approved, and all decisions are final.
Students admitted to Ph.D. program must be "in residence" for at least four semesters, although it is generally expected that a Ph.D. will require between eight and 10 semesters to complete.
The chair of your Special Committee awards one residence unit after the satisfactory completion of each semester of full-time study. Fractional units may be awarded for unsatisfactory progress.
Adding an external minor
Ph.D. students can enhance their statistical expertise by selecting an external minor that complements their research interests. Popular choices include Computational Biology, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, and Operations Research.
The declaration of an external minor entails selecting (i) a field other than Statistics in which to minor; (ii) a subject & concentration within the specified field; and, (iii) a minor advisor representing this field/subject/concentration.
The minor requires three-five graduate courses and is guided by a faculty advisor from the chosen field.
While any choice of external minor subject is technically acceptable, the requirement that the minor representative serve on your Special Committee strongly suggests that the ideal choice(s) should share some natural connection with your choice of dissertation topic.
Your special committee
The Special Committee is a group of faculty members that advise and guide you throughout your research and degree completion.
Upon arrival, a temporary Special Committee is also declared for you, consisting of the Director of Graduate Studies (chair) and two other faculty members in the field of Statistics. This temporary committee shall remain in place until you form your own Special Committee for the purposes of writing your doctoral dissertation.
The chair of your Special Committee serves as your primary academic advisor; however, you should always feel free to contact and/or chat with any of the graduate faculty in the field of Statistics.
The formation of a Special Committee for your dissertation research should serve your objective of writing the best possible dissertation. The Graduate School requires that this committee contain at least three members that simultaneously represent a certain combination of subjects and concentrations.
- The chair of the committee is your principal dissertation advisor and always represents a specified concentration within the subject and field of Statistics.
- The Graduate School additionally requires Ph.D. students to have at least two minor subjects represented on your special committee. For students in the field of Statistics, these remaining two members must either represent (i) a second concentration within the subject of Statistics, and one external minor subject; or, (ii) two external minor subjects. Each minor advisor must agree to serve on your special committee; as a result, the identification of these minor members should occur at least six months prior to your A Exam.
In addition to A and B exams, students are required to meet with their committee at least once in each academic year following their A Exam.
This meeting will take the form of a presentation of progress to date and feedback from the committee. The committee must indicate to the DGS that the student is making satisfactory progress. This requirement will be waived in the years that the student takes their A or B exams.
To choose or change an advisor or committee member, students must submit a request online from the “Advisor” section of their Student Center prior to completing the A exam. After the A exam has been taken, all changes must be by petition.
Any member, including the chair, may resign at any time from a special committee. It is the student’s responsibility to reconstitute their special committee. Failure to reconstitute a committee, will result in withdrawal from the University.
Responsible Conduct of Research Training (RCR)
Ethical researchers and scholars think critically about the impact of their behavior on others — their research subjects, students and trainees, advisors and other field faculty, and certainly the scientific community and society at large.
Every graduate student pursuing a research degree (master’s or doctoral) is required to complete training on Responsible Conduct of Research, addressing issues of authorship, peer review, plagiarism, and research misconduct. Each student must complete online training through Cornell’s Office of Research Integrity and Assurance (ORIA) prior to the end of the second registered semester.
If your research involves live vertebrates seek and receive a notice of approval from Cornell’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee prior to ordering, acquiring, or handling animals for your research.
If your research involves human participants seek review and receive a notice of approval or exemption from the Institutional Review Board before beginning your research.
Feedback review between advisees and advisors
Regular advisor-student meetings should occur weekly or several times monthly. The Student Progress Review (SPR) provides formal written feedback between advisors and students but does not replace these frequent in-person meetings.
Currently students and advisors are sent an email with instructions on how to complete the SPR, the link to the forms, and the deadline for this to be completed. At the spring Information Science field meeting, the entire field reviews a summary of our student’s progress.
This meeting gives the opportunity for advisors to discuss with the group the progress of their students both what has gone well, and to get advice on getting a student back on track if needed. The content of the SPR is not shared with the group. The Chairperson supplies a summary for the purpose of the field meeting only.
The full contents of the SPR is available to the student, the special committee, DGS and GFA. Please see the Graduate School’s website for the full details about this process and FAQ’s.
The A Exam
The A Exam is the doctoral candidacy examination administered to students in the Ph.D. program after the completion of all required coursework.
The Graduate School requires all Ph.D. students to have their A Exam prior to the beginning of their 7th semester in the program.
The Special Committee may, at their discretion, require both written and oral portions of the A Exam. Per the Code of Legislation of the Graduate School Faculty, the Special Committee may also choose to award a Ph.D. student a "Non Thesis Masters Degree" upon completion of the A Exam.
All students must submit a schedule of exam form online no later than 12 days prior to the date of the exam. Graduate School rules require that the A Exam be announced no later than seven days prior to the date of the exam and open to all members of the Field Faculty. Students may invite students to their exam, but this is not mandatory. If a student wishes to invite current students to their exam they are responsible to send the invitation prior to the exam date. Students should alert the GFA as soon as they and their committee have decided on a date and time of the exam.
After the exam is completed the student will initiate the A exam results form online. All members of the committee need to agree to the results and electronically sign off on the results form no later than three days after the date of the exam. The Information Science Field may award a non-thesis Masters upon passing the A Exam. This should be noted on the results form by the Chairperson when they sign off on the form. If this is the case, students will have the non-thesis Master’s degree conferred on the following conferral date in either May, August, or December, and receive a diploma.
The B Exam
The B Exam is the dissertation defense, and is an oral examination at which you present and discuss your major results.
Per Graduate School residency requirements, you must complete a minimum of two semesters of satisfactory study before you can schedule your A Exam, and a minimum of four semesters of satisfactory study before you can schedule your B Exam.
- There must be at least two semesters with satisfactory progress in between your A & B exams.
- Your A Exam must be taken within seven semesters of entering the program; your B Exam must be taken within seven years of entering the program.
In some cases, exceptions to the various rules delineated above may be requested by filing a General Petition with the Graduate School. This includes any changes to your Special Committee after the A Exam.
The B Exam is to be scheduled at least 12 calendar days in advance via the Schedule of Exam form. Announcing the exam to the field and the cohort is the same as the A Exam. Zoom links and announcement requirements also are the same as the A Exam.
Research in the field
Candidates for the doctoral degree must complete a dissertation that contributes original research and new knowledge to the field statistics.
The dissertation represents an original research effort leading to new knowledge. The finished dissertation must conform to the format requirements for a doctoral dissertation listed by the Graduate School. All dissertations are submitted online following the Graduate School’s protocols.
Students are expected to make a thesis proposal by the end of their third year. As part of the thesis proposal, the student will be required to demonstrate depth in at least one concentration, sufficient to carry out fundamental research. The student's Ph.D. committee will decide how this expertise will be evaluated.
This proposal must be approved by the Special Committee after discussion at a committee meeting. The proposal will include no less than a statement of the research question or questions, a brief review of the relevant literature, and a plan of research for answering the research question.
The B Exam may not occur less than three months after the proposal has been approved by the Special Committee.
A complete draft of the dissertation should be given to each Special Committee member at least six weeks before the final examination.
At least five business days prior to the examination, each member should receive a copy of the dissertation, to be retained until the examination. Normally, the student can expect to revise the dissertation after successful completion of the B Exam. The faculty requires publication of Ph.D. dissertations by abstract and UMI Dissertation Express.
2024
Inbeom Lee - “Latent Variable Based Methods for Matrix Clustering and Generalized Linear Models"
Dissertation Advisor: Yang Ning
Initial job placement: University of Chicago Booth School of Business - Postdoctoral Principal Researcher
Ritwik Sadhu - "Statistical Inference for Regularized Optimal Transport"
Dissertation Advisor: Kengo Kato
Initial job placement: University of Washington - Postdoctoral Researcher
Kimberly Webb -"Estimation methods in the presence of outcome and mediator misclassification"
Dissertation Advisor: Martin Wells
Initial job placement: University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine - Assistant Professor
2023
David Kent - “Smoothness-Penalized Deconvolution: Rates of Convergence, Choice of Tuning Parameter, and Inference"
Dissertation Advisor: David Ruppert
Initial job placement: VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR - Cornell University
Yuchen Xu - “Dynamic Atomic Column Detection in Transmission Electron Microscopy Videos via Ridge Estimation”
Dissertation Advisor: David Matteson
Initial job placement: Postdoctoral Fellow - UCLA
Siyi Deng - “Optimal and Safe Semi-supervised Estimation and Inference for High-dimensional Linear Regression"
Dissertation Advisor: Yang Ning
Initial job placement: Data Scientist - TikTok
If you wish to view projects prior to 2023, please email comm-office [at] cis.cornell.edu (comm-office[at]cis[dot]cornell[dot]edu).
Enhance your degree with a Master's in CS.
The Special Master's in CS is open to current students pursuing a Ph.D. in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Information Science, and Statistics. The program empowers students to master computational methods alongside their primary research, creating versatile experts ready for tomorrow's challenges.