Campus news in brief

Alumni make donations to Tepper Quadrangle

Carnegie Mellon recently received $17 million in donations from three different sources to support the construction of the Tepper Quadrangle and the nascent Presidential Fellowships and Scholarships Initiative.

Carnegie Mellon trustee James E. Rohr and his wife, Sharon, as well as Legendary Entertainment, founded and chaired by trustee Thomas Tull, made a donation to the upcoming Tepper Quadrangle construction project.

Alumnus Wallace Sadauskas and the estate of his late partner, Patricia Chotiner Traylor, gave to the President Fellowships and Scholarships Initiative.

“The university is committed to attracting and supporting outstanding students from around the world, and offering them an innovative education that takes advantage of CMU’s path-breaking research and practice across disciplines,” President Subra Suresh said in a university press release. “These gifts help fulfill this fundamental vision.”

The university announced these gifts at an event in California last Thursday, “Integrated Intelligence: San Francisco and Beyond,” during which President Subra Suresh, alumni, students, and faculty spoke about the future of machine learning.

Statistics Department among fastest growing

The American Statistical Association (ASA) recently featured Carnegie Mellon in its magazine in an article about how the university’s statistics department keeps students engaged in the growing field of statistics.

Carnegie Mellon’s statistics department is one of the fastest growing in the nation. Since 2010 the number of statistics majors at Carnegie Mellon has doubled; since 2005 it has grown 20-fold.

“The Statistics Department — and indeed Carnegie Mellon as a whole — exhibits an ethos that values and benefits from true interdisciplinary work,” said Christopher R. Genovese, head of the statistics department in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, in a university press release. “Our undergraduate curriculum builds on this by offering authentic engagement with interdisciplinary problems and extensive experience with the analysis of real data. (We have no ‘textbook’ datasets after the introductory courses.) I think this is a key to both the recent growth and the continuing demand for our courses.”

The ASA cites statistics as the most rapidly growing field that falls under the umbrella of Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering (STEM), outpacing even computer-related fields.