The Department of Statistics currently occupies approximately 60 offices on the fourth floor of the Blocker Building. Graduate students typically occupy a shared office, with those students working as research assistants to permanent faculty sharing an office with only one other student, and located near their major professor. Postdoctoral researchers generally share an office. The trainees will be housed in a series of offices within the Department of Statistics.

All student and postdoctoral researcher offices have at least one computer terminal, and typically have multiple Ethernet drops. The College of Science has agreed to provide an integrated computing environment so that trainees can access the same disk space/files whether they are in their Statistics or Nutrition offices. We anticipate that all program participants will be equipped with a notebook computer.

The computing environment within the Department of Statistics is excellent. Our computer network is supervised by Dr. Henrik Schmiediche, a long-time employee of the Department who has a Ph.D. in Statistics. Not counting computer laboratories and systems dedicated to distance learning, the Department of Statistics operates a heterogeneous network of over 50 Solaris, Linux, Mac and Windows computers. The majority of computationally intensive tasks are performed on five publicly available UltraSparc 1 and 10 systems with 256MB or 512MB RAM each. Individual faculty operate an additional ten multi-user Ultrasparc and Linux systems capable of sharing file and CPU resources over the network. The major systems in our department are linked by ATM or 100 megabit ethernet connections. Four additional high-end Linux systems (Pentium 700's) have been purchased for public use and were added to the Network at the end of 1999. A powerful dual Pentium file server and an additional 2 high end Athlon systems with 768MB of RAM dedicated to simulations were added in March, 2000. The following Statistical software is available to all students and faculty on the Unix system: the latest versions of SAS, Splus, Mathematica, Matlab and Stata.

The facilities of the laboratories of the nutritionists are modern and comprehensive. Here we note only that Dr. Chapkin, Dr. Lupton and Dr. Turner are all located in the Kleberg Animal Biotechnology Building. Their laboratories include three main rooms (1,200 sq. ft. each), a smaller tissue culture facility, and a separate microscopy room. The tissue culture facility, includes biohazard laminar flow hoods, three incubators, inverted microscope, centrifuges, and a dark room. Equipment in their main laboratories include: a high speed refrigerated centrifuge (Sorvall RC-5B), scanning densitometer, an ultracentrifuge (Beckman L8-M), refrigerators and freezers, -80⁰ C freezers, autoclave, cold room, compound stereo microscopes, analytical balances, scintillation spectrometer (Beckman), UV-visible microtiter plate reader (Molecular Dynamics), gas chromatographs (Hewlett-Packard), System Gold 126 HPLC (Beckman), Packard Flow radiodetector, Nikon Eclipse TE300 fluorescence inverted microscope equipped with a Princeton Intruments Micro max cooled digital camera, an Optronics 3 chip CCD with on chip integration, and Metamorph software and imaging workstation, and an Olympus microscope equipped with a Sony DXC-930 color video camera, and Taqman real-time PCR system (PE Biosystems GeneAmp^TM 9600 unit).

The trainees will have office space (tentatively room 210) in the Kleberg Building. This room has ethernet drops for internet access, desks, filing cabinets and bookshelves. The room will also serve as office space for some graduate students, which will facilitate communication among the trainees and the students conducting research.