Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Established in 1965, the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) is a modern campus university covering a broad range of disciplines ranging from Life Sciences, Natural Sciences and Engineering to Humanities and Social Sciences. Located in the centre of a metropolitan region of over five million people, RUB is host to more than33 000 students and 4 000 staff, both domestic and from abroad. RUB is one of the strongest research universities in Germany ranking second based on the number collaborative research centres (SFBs) funded by the German Research Foundation. Drawing its strengths from both the diversity and proximity of disciplines on a single, coherent campus, research excellence has been developed primarily at disciplinary interfaces in the Life Sciences, Natural Sciences and Engineering. Moreover, RUB is Germany’s leading institution in implementing the Bologna reforms to facilitate international student mobility: over 90% of the traditional study courses have been transformed to the two-tiered Bachelor/Master system. For its achievements in large-scale transformation processes RUB was awarded the label “Best-Practice University” by the Centre for Higher Education Development in 2004.

The Faculty of Mathematics of the RUB is one of the leading institutions in Germany. It offers a Bachelor and a Master of Science as well as a PhD programme in Mathematics. In the 2009 research ranking of the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) the faculty of mathematics was ranked in the top group of German faculties (number of doctorates, number of publications, third party funding etc.). The Statistics group of the faculty consists of two full professors, 6 Assistant professors and 12 PhD students and is an integrated part of the collaborative research centers SFB Tr12 „Symmetry and Universality in Mesoscopic Systems” and SFB 823 „Statistics of nonlinear dynamic processes” funded by the German Research Foundation which offer an attractive research environment for many leading scientists in the field.

Main Project Tasks and Experiences related to the project: Main methodological research areas of the statistics group at RUB are design of experiments, nonparametric statistics, time series, model-selection, goodness-of-fit, biostatistics and applications, in particular in dose response trials. In the last 5 years the chair received a substantial amount of funding (about 2 000 000 EUR) from the BMBF, NIH and DFG. There exists also a close cooperation with the pharmaceutical companies Bayer (Berlin, Wuppertal) and Novartis (Basel), which support several PhD students at the chair since many years.

Key Personnel:

Prof. Holger Dette is chair of Mathematical Statistics at the Faculty of Mathematics of RUB. He graduated at the University of Hannover at the Institute of Applied Genetics and received his habilitation at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Göttingen. He was Editor of Metrika and is currently Editor of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference as well as Associate Editor of all leading Journals in Mathematical Statistics (Annals of Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Ser. B). He has published more than 250 papers with more than 80 co-authors.