Western Michigan University Department of Statistics

09/15/2026

09/11/2026

On April 9-10, the math department will be hosting the annual conference of the Michigan section of the Mathematical Association of America. Faculty from around the state will attend.

09/10/2026

The math department will have their annual Math Carnival on the afternoon of Saturday, November 21. Dr. Levin is looking for volunteers. They have needs for volunteers to design or implement activities and for logistics. This year, they have plans to have some activities in Spanish and Arabic in addition to English.

Sign up to volunteer below:

The Kalamazoo Math Carnival 2026 will take place on November 21, 2026 from 3-5 pm. Please let us know if you're interested in helping out and in what capacity! Reach out to Dr. Mariana Levin, WMU Math professor and Kalamazoo Math Carnival organizer, at [email protected]. We also do outreach ac...

09/09/2026

There will be a Michigan Student Math Conference at Hope College on October 10. Presentations from undergraduates and graduate students in math and statistics are encouraged. Free for students, $15 for others. Sign up is here:

We invite all students interested in research in mathematical sciences to attend the first annual Michigan Student Math Conference (MiSMaC) on Saturday, October 10, 2026 at Hope College in Holland, MI. The day will feature two plenary talks and student presentations. Registration fee: Free for

09/08/2026

The Math Club will meet at 4pm on Fridays this year. Events planned include a talk about biostatistics from U of MI biostatistician Michele Peruzzi on September 18. They are also working to include a sports analytics talk by alumnus Brian Hadley in our 2026-27 line-up (stay tuned!)

09/04/2026

On Friday, September 11 at 4pm, the math department is hosting a picnic. Please let us know if you can come! We will plan for food and activities based on RSVPs we receive by Wednesday at noon. RSVP here:

03/25/2026

Today is Giving Day at WMU! You can donate to the Department of Statistics at the link below. Donations can be made through tomorrow, Thursday, March 26th at 8:00 am.

Join me and make a gift to Western Michigan on Giving Day!

03/16/2026

March 25th is Giving Day at WMU! You can donate to the Statistics Department at the link below.

Join me and make a gift to Western Michigan on Giving Day!

03/05/2026

Tomorrow, Friday, March 6th is Spirit Day and next week, March 9th through 13th, is spring break. Enjoy your time off and be safe!

02/26/2026

Colloquium Presentation by Ruyu Zhou on Friday, February 27th 11:00 am - 12:00 pm in the Alavi Commons Rooms (6625 Everett Tower).

Title: Differential Privacy and Statistics: Privatized Inference and the Inherent Privacy of Sampling

Abstract: Privacy-preserving data analysis has become a central challenge in modern statistics, with Differential Privacy (DP) emerging as the gold standard for protecting individual-level information. In this talk, I will present two projects at the intersection of DP and statistics. First, focusing on privatized inference, I will introduce a general framework for privacy-preserving statistical inference that constructs privatized interval estimators via consistent, privatized posterior quantile estimation. I theoretically establish mean-squared error consistency for the proposed estimators and demonstrate improved privacy-utility tradeoffs through extensive empirical experiments. Second, focusing on the inherent privacy guarantees provided by posterior sampling, I develop a unified Rényi divergence framework to quantify the DP guarantees achieved "for free" when releasing a single posterior sample. These theoretical results substantially tighten existing conservative bounds and broaden the class of Bayesian models for which inherent DP guarantees can be rigorously characterized.