Sastry Pantula, dean of the College of Natural Sciences at Cal State San Bernardino, will be the featured lunch speaker at the kickoff meeting of the Southern California American Statistical Association on Dec. 1. Pantula, who joined CSUSB in July, will talk about statistics professions and about the American Statistical Association (ASA), where he served as president in 2010. The meeting will be from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Mary Hill Center at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa. Prior to CSUSB, he was a professor in the department of statistics at Oregon State University, where he served as the dean of the College of Science from August 2013 to August 2017. Before that, he served three years as director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Pantula spent more than 30 years as a statistics professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU), where he began his academic career in 1982. At NCSU, he also served as the director of Graduate Programs, the head of the Department of Statistics and the director of the Institute of Statistics. Pantula has an outstanding record of service to the profession. Along with serving as president of the ASA, he served six years as treasurer for the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and three years as treasurer for ASA. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and ASA, and a member of the Honor Societies, Phi Kappa Phi, Mu Sigma Rho and Sigma Xi. He was inducted into the NCSU Academy of Outstanding Teachers. The meeting’s keynote speaker is Shujie Ma, an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Riverside. The meeting will also feature student presentations: Mingming Liu, graduate student, UCR, “Subgroup analysis in longitudinal data;” and Gordon David Mosher, undergraduate student, UCR, “Using Julia to analyze the human genome.” For more information, visit the Southern California American Statistical Association website. For more information on Cal State San Bernardino, contact the CSUSB Office of Strategic Communication at (909) 537-5007 and visit the Inside CSUSB website.