James Booth, professor of statistics and data science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), will be the next chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, effective August 1.
Booth has been a professor at Cornell for 20 years, joining the since-restructured Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology in CALS in 2004. For nine years, Booth served as chair of the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology. Before joining Cornell, he was an associate professor and then full professor at the University of Florida for several years. He remains a CALS faculty member in the Department of Statistics and Data Science.
“With his extensive experience in leadership roles at Cornell, I am confident that Jim will continue to advance and grow the department’s educational and research mission,” said Kavita Bala, dean of the Cornell Bowers CIS. “Over the next couple of years, SDS will move into the new building for Bowers CIS, and grow its faculty. I look forward to working closely with Jim in this next phase of growth for SDS, and in enabling new collaborations in research and teaching for the department.”
Booth holds a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Kentucky. His research interests involve basic statistical methodology, including the bootstrap and Monte Carlo methods, clustering, exact inference, mixed models, generalized linear models, and also applications in bioinformatics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and has served on the Board of Trustees for the National Institute of Statistical Science since 2012, including a term as chair.
“In my time at Cornell and in the Department of Statistics and Data Science, I’ve been grateful to work alongside world-class faculty and students who share a passion for applying statistical methods to solve our most pressing global challenges,” Booth said. “I’m very excited and honored to lead the Department of Statistics and Data Science – my academic home for two decades – as it continues to inform and shape the field.”
Booth succeeds Martin Wells, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Sciences, who served as a chair for many years and was the founding chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science, which was restructured into a multi-college department in 2019.
“Cornell has a long and rich tradition of excellence in statistics, and Marty has been, and continues to be, an instrumental part of it,” Bala said. “Under his guidance, Statistics and Data Science has flourished and grown. I greatly appreciate Marty’s leadership and dedication to the department, Cornell Bowers CIS, and Cornell University as a whole.”
Wells joined the Cornell community in 1987 and has served as a department chair for a number of Cornell statistics groups before the founding of the Department of Statistics and Data Science. In addition to his positions within Cornell Bowers CIS and ILR, Wells is also a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and an elected member of the Cornell Law School Faculty.
The Department of Statistics and Data Science is a multi-college department comprising Cornell Bowers CIS, CALS, the ILR School, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
By Louis DiPietro, a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.