College of Natural Sciences - Travis Lilley Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence

We are a group of faculty, graduate students, and staff in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences (SDS) who wish to create an annual award for SDS PhD students in honor of Travis Lilley. Travis was a PhD Student in Statistics at UT Austin from 2018 until his untimely death in November 2023. He was a kind and generous colleague, and a gifted researcher who also excelled in teaching.

Through impactful research and innovative educational programs, our department strives to embody The University of Texas at Austin's motto: “What starts here changes the world.” Our Ph.D. in Statistics program strives to be an exemplar of graduate training in statistics. Our students are exposed to cutting edge statistical methodology through the modern curriculum and work with faculty members to take a deeper dive into special topics, gain experience in working in interdisciplinary teams and learn research skills through flexible research electives. Graduates of our program are prepared to be leaders in statistics and machine learning in both academia and industry.

Travis William Lilley

1989-2024

Help us recognize SDS graduate students who excel in classroom teaching and contribute significantly to the learning mission of our department and the university.

Graduate students play a vital role in teaching within the SDS Department, contributing not only by assisting faculty as teaching assistants, and sometimes instructors themselves, but also by bringing fresh perspectives and valuable mentorship to undergraduate students. Their work supports the department’s instructional mission, and provides graduate students with essential teaching experience that prepares them for future careers in academia and industry.

The funds will be used to match a recent generous donation provided by a member of our community. We hope to match this contribution and raise an additional $15,000. The additional contributions will enable us to create an endowment dedicated to the enduring legacy of Travis Lilley, and provide a sustainable funding source to support an annual award.

Awardees will be selected at the end of each spring semester and will be given to SDS graduate students who demonstrated exceptional dedication to teaching during the prior academic year.

Your donation will help our department to foster a culture of teaching excellence among graduate teaching assistants and instructors. SDS PhD students play an important role in the educational mission of our department to provide high quality training in statistics and data sciences. We want to recognize and reward students who excel as educators in the discipline of statistics and data science.

Examples of teaching excellence recognized by the new award could include, but are not limited to:

• outstanding teaching in the classroom
• creation or use of new and innovative teaching methods and course materials
• effectiveness in grading/feedback, review sessions or one-on-one instruction

Undergraduate students collaborate on a class project in “Chi Square” — one of our dedicated workspaces for SDS Majors.

Your gift will also honor the memory of Travis Lilley.

Having earned a B.S. degree in Psychology and Mathematics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, followed by a M.S. degree in Statistics from Texas A&M University, Travis had already demonstrated and showed enormous promise as a contributor to Statistics and research in Statistics. This promise was particularly apparent in the areas of collaborative work with colleagues from other scientific disciplines such as epidemiology and clinical medicine. Over the course of his career, Travis made critical contributions to studies of air pollution and asthma, as well as to studies in anxiety, substance abuse, and smoking cessation.

Travis also excelled as a teacher of Statistics. For example, Travis served as primary instructor in an introductory course in data management, computing, and analysis, targeted towards new investigators at the then-emerging Dell Medical School. This course targets a challenging and heterogeneous community of learners. Travis was uniformly liked and greatly appreciated by these learners and by his teaching colleagues in other modules of the course. This is due to his deep warmth as well as his dedication to professional quality in all he did. Travis’s life was a tremendous blessing and his passing a great loss. He has been deeply missed by our community ever since.

Travis Lilley at the 2022 Ph.D. Poster Session presenting his research project “Adaptive Bayesian Cluster Randomized Trials with Ordinal Endpoints."

Please donate to the Travis Lilley Memorial Award and support teaching excellence in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences!