The Department of Statistics & Applied Probability is participating in the next cycle of the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Academic Initiative Professorships. This competitive intramural initiative, now in its fifth cycle, establishes a cluster of Mellichamp Chairs and brings a focused campus-wide effort to enhance UCSB's excellence in a targeted area.

The fifth cycle that will start in 2023 is focused on Racial Justice. The PSTAT department is part of a group led by Environmental Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and the Bren School, as well as the departments of Black Studies, Geography, the American Indian Indigenous Collective, Asian American Studies, and the Environmental Humanities Initiative, to establish a Mellichamp Cluster in Racial Environmental Justice. The Environmental Racial Justice cluster aims to explore the environmental and climate injustices facing communities of color and indigenous populations, building capacity for quantitative research on racial environmental justice to complement existing strengths in humanistic and qualitative approaches, and expanding definitions of the environment to include built and urban spaces.  Building on work in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, the cluster is designed to strengthen disciplinary pluralism and the productive integration of quantitative and qualitative research, including data science initiatives.  One of the target areas of the upcoming cluster will be quantiative and data-analytic aspects of environmental justice, connecting to PSTAT fields of focus in spatial statistics, causal statistics and data science.