Department Discretionary Fund

The Department Discretionary Fund is a general purpose fund managed by the department chair that covers activities and initiatives at all levels, including career development, lecture series, stipends, and community outreach.

The Graduate Opportunity Fund

This newly created endowment provides support for the department’s most pressing and strategic needs. Preference will be given to providing support for undergraduate and graduate students in the department who enhance the diversity of the student body of the department, with particular emphasis on graduate student support. Graduate student support can include, but is not limited to, support for summer research fellowships, research support, travel funds, funding for academic conferences and stipend supplements to recruit top-tier graduate students.

The Raj Chandra Bose Graduate Student Travel Fund

(through Gary G. Koch and Carolyn J. Koch and friends of the Department of Statistics and Operations Research)

This endowed fund provides support for graduate student travel. Support from the fund can include, but is not limited to, top-up support, summer research fellowships and funding for academic or professional conferences for Department of Statistics and Operations Research students.

Dr. Koch received his Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at UNC (one of the parent departments of the current STOR Department) in 1968 under the direction of Dr. R.C. Bose.

Dr. Walter L. Deemer Excellence in Teaching Fund

This endowed fund is used to annually recognize and reward teaching excellence of a faculty member and/or graduate student in the department.

The Harold Hotelling Memorial Fund

This fund provides support for the instructional and research efforts of the department, including support for the annual series of guest lectures for faculty and students known as The Harold Hotelling Lectures.

Harold Hotelling, 1895-1973, received his doctorate in mathematics, Topology, from Princeton University in 1924. Hotelling was the founder of the mathematical statistics group at Columbia University in 1931.

Along with W. Allen Wallis and Jacob Wolfowitz, Hotelling was the charter member of the renowned Statistical Research Group (SRG) during World War II. Hotelling was one of the three original founding leaders of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and served as its president in 1941.

Dr. Hotelling also served as president of the Econometrics Society in 1936-37. He was the first chairman of the “Department of Mathematical Statistics” at the University of North Carolina, as it was originally named at the time of its inception in 1946. Upon his arrival to Chapel Hill, Hotelling attracted several leading researchers, including R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy, P. L. Hsu, E. J. G. Pitman and Herbert Robbins to the department. Hotelling remained chairman at Chapel Hill until 1952 and formally retired in 1966. In 1962 he was appointed Kenan Professor at the University of North Carolina. Hotelling received the North Carolina Award for contributions to science in 1972. The inaugural Hotelling Lectures were given by David R. Cox in 1980.

The Wassily Hoeffding Scholarship Fund

Contributions to this endowment fund support scholarship awards to graduate students. Awards are made based on demonstrated academic merit.

Wassily Hoeffding, 1914-1991, was one of the founding fathers of nonparametric statistics. He received his doctorate in 1940 from the University of Berlin in which he studied properties of bivariate distributions which are invariant under certain transformations. He joined the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1947 and spent the rest of his career at Chapel Hill. He was the Wald Lecturer in 1967 and served as the president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1969. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 1976, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1985; the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Statistical Institute. He was an elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1973 he was appointed Kenan Professor at the University of North Carolina. After he retired, the University of North Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences honored him by establishing the Wassily Hoeffding Professorship.

The Stamatis Cambanis Memorial Fund

This fund supports graduate education and research in the department.

Stamatis Cambanis, 1943-1995, is internationally known for his fundamental contributions to the theory of stable processes and to problems of signal detection. Cambanis received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969. He then took a postdoctoral position in the University of North Carolina Statistics Department, which had begun a “specialty track” in statistical communication theory. He spent his entire career in the department, taking a permanent faculty appointment in 1971, was promoted to full professor in 1981, and served as chairman from 1986-93. He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1984 and Fellow of the IEEE in 1989. In 1987 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Mathematics by the University of Athens, Greece.

Stamatis’ work in the development of the “Center for Stochastic Processes” helped bring wide recognition to the department, providing a framework for collaborative research with a broad spectrum of junior and senior visitors. He greatly enjoyed directing students’ research, insisting on high standards and bringing out the very best in his advisees. His high enthusiasm also extended to the classroom, where he was an outstandingly effective teacher at all levels of undergraduate and graduate instruction, over a wide range of probability and statistical theory.

The George E. Nicholson Memorial Fund

Contributions to this fund support scholarship awards to graduate students. Awards are made based on demonstrated academic merit.

George Nicholson, 1918-1971, received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1948. He was an international leader in graduate education in Statistics and Operations Research. Under the auspices of the United States State Department, he developed cooperative programs with other universities in Paris, Rome, Sao Paulo, and Nihon University in Tokyo, advising them in their curricular development in Statistics and Operations Research. At Nihon University he helped create the first Department of Statistics in Japan.

Throughout his career Dr. Nicholson continued to serve his government and those of other nations. He received the Medal of Freedom in 1947 for his work as an Operations Research Analyst in World War II. After the war he was a prime consultant of the Department of Defense and the Air Force in weapons evaluation and organization. He served as the U.S. member, and then as chairman, of the Operations Research Committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He rendered his expert advice to the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany and of Japan in the development of operations analysis capabilities. For his valuable contributions to NATO, Dr. Nicholson was again decorated in 1965 with the Exceptional Civilian Service Medal by the U. S. Department of Defense. Nicholson was the chair of the Department of Statistics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1952 until his untimely death in 1971.