"

Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics Molly Walsh received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Northwestern and her B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Notre Dame. She primarily focuses on applied statistics, specifically biostatistics. She spends much of her time researching, but enjoys teaching and working with her students.

What classes are you teaching this semester? What is your favorite part about teaching these classes?

The two classes I’m teaching this semester are Statistics for Business I ... We have about 375 students taking the class every semester so I have about 190 of these students this semester. The thing that I like the most about teaching that course is the enthusiasm in the class ... They’re excited to learn even if it’s about something like statistics, which can be a dry subject. The other class I’m teaching is Statistics for the Life Sciences. This is a course that is more geared towards students that are going into the medical field.

What topics interest you the most? And which are your favorite topics to teach?

Biostatistics is something that I’ve spent a lot of my time researching and teaching, but I like teaching all different students and statistics in general. Statistics can be applied to so many different fields, such as the medical field, engineering, science and sports. There are just so many great uses of statistics. I always like it when someone realizes that statistics can always answer a question that they’re trying to answer.