Faculty profiles

We would like to introduce you to faculty who play particularly important roles in H&SS General Education.  Some of these people designed or teach courses that are core to the Program; others are distinguished by the excellence of their teaching and advising of students.

Profile: Oded Meyer
Excitement, passion, and . . . statistics? Is this the old Sesame Street game of "one of these things is not like the other"? No, these are terms that come into play when Oded Meyer teaches statistics. As an undergraduate student in Israel, Oded had the good fortune to have a professor who taught him that statistics was not just a lot of numbers. Rather, it was a way to formulate questions and come to profound answers about some of the most interesting and urgent problems in life. It was not just math, but a joyously creative use of numbers in the service of producing new knowledge.

Oded Meyer

As an Associate Teaching Professor of Statistics and the mastermind behind one of the three core courses in the H&SS Gen Ed, Statistical Reasoning and Practice, Oded is dedicated to passing that excitement, that passion for knowledge, along to his students. There is no such thing as just a problem to be solved in Oded's classroom; there are keys to larger puzzles, critical pieces to a big picture. As a result, students not only learn specific skills from him; they learn why those skills matter.

Oded is the director of undergraduate studies in statistics, and the undergraduate advisor for the statistics major and minor, as well as for the joint major in economics and statistics.

Oded received his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Pittsburgh. He invests all his teaching and research interests and energy in one focus: exploring how to improve and expand students' learning of statistics. Besides designing Statistical Reasoning and teaching Statistical Methods, which he also designed, he is particularly interested in online learning, and has recently developed a "stand-alone" web-based introductory statistics course as part of Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative. Oded's course is currently used nationally and internationally, and instructors who use it to support their teaching report that it has been successful both in terms of learning gains and in terms of renewed students' enthusiasm about statistics. Dr. Meyer was invited to present this contribution to the field of statistics education in the International Conference on Teaching Statistics.