Douglas Nychka
Applied Mathematics and Statistics,
Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO

Beginning in August 2018 Douglas Nychka joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Colorado School of Mines as a Professor, where he plans to reconnect with undergraduate teaching with a focus on modernizing the curriculum in statistics and making it seamless with the emerging area of data science.

Nychka continues to holds an appointment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as an emeritus scientist. At NCAR he served as Director of the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) from 2004-2017. His main task at IMAGe was to enrich the scientific and educational activity at NCAR through mathematical methods and models. He also used the large scientific projects at NCAR to engage the mathematical science communities in new applications and to motivate new mathematics and statistics.

Some of Nychka's current research interests are nonparametric regression (mostly splines), statistical computing, spatial statistics and spatial designs. He was a mathematics/physics undergrad at Duke University, with Robert Wolpert as his advisor, and he received a PhD in 1983 from the University of Wisconsin under the direction of Grace Wahba. Although NychkaÕs original thesis work was on splines and inverse problems, over time he has become more interested in spatial statistics and Bayesian methods for curve and surface fitting.

Prior to his work at NCAR, he spent 14 years as a faculty member in the Statistics Department at North Carolina State University, working on spatial statistics for large data sets with Dorit Hammerling, Soutir Bandyopadhyay, and Will Kleiber. The newest R package from that work was LatticeKrig, a spatial data package that uses both fields and spam to handle large spatial data sets.