NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences Statistics Program Gabor J Szekely Statistics Program Director ASA Chairs Workshop Alexandria, VA, August 1, 2009

What does Statistics support? Individual Investigators & Small Groups Focused Research Groups (FRG); CMG, Joint DMS/NIGMS activity; etc, Institutes SAMSI Workforce NSF- and MPS-wide Initiatives Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), DTRA, etc.

Funding Rate

Sir Winston Churchill: "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty was difficult and extremely volatile 20% budget cut? 50% stimulus?

Long delays in processing awards many exchanges about the nature of ARRA and about the length of delay

Life is Good (?) 2009: financial problems everywhere 2009: NSF ARRA $3 billion (50% of NSF budget) Statistics received a fair share?

Statistics Program Budget??? $ ???? Lower bound, upper bound Interagency programs: NIGMS, DTRA Interdisciplinary program within NSF: CMG, CDI, …

Many new areas, few unifying theories Statisticians are more flexible in their research areas than most scientists This is good (many important applications, good grant opportunities) This is bad (statistics becomes too thin, there are too many seemingly unrelated methods) Where are the unifying theories?

We cannot fund proposals … NOT submitted !!! Trivial but … This is where you can help: Please encourage submissions of great ideas: NOT true : if the PI is not an international star OR if the PIs institute is not in the top tier then the proposal is almost surely declined.

WE NEED NEW TRANSFORMATIVE IDEAS In case of many International Stars of Statistics (ISS) we know what we get: high quality, deep proposals, many hot topics that were transformative a few years/decades ago Please encourage new researchers to submit new transformative ideas

Transformative … ? RA Fisher Statistical Methods for Research Workers …cited by 7900 A Wald Sequential Analysis cited by2669 JW Tukey Exploratory Data Analysis-5620

ARRA (stimulus money) Who received ARRA money from the Statistics ARRA budget? 1. New researchers 2. Outstanding PhD advisors

What do we support? Everything that is `transformative Outstanding collaborations with other disciplines, important applications Unifying theories

A crises is a terrible thing to waste