The Department of Statistics at UNSW currently consists of a healthy 15 full time academic members of staff. This includes 2 full professors, 1 associate professor, 5 senior lecturers, 4 lecturers, 2 associate lecturers and 2 honorary associates. Additionally there are 8 Ph.D. and over 30 Masters and Honours students, making the Department a vibrant and dynamic place for active, world class research and teaching.

The Department of Statistics is part of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, located in the Kensington Campus nestled in the heart of Australia's most cosmopolitan capital city, City of Sydney.

The first courses in Statistics taught within the University of New South Wales were Post-Diploma - one operated even in the University's first year of teaching, 1948, before it was officially named (initially as the N.S.W. Institute of Technology). These courses, usually intended for externally recruited audiences but sometimes for staff from the University's scientific, technological and engineering faculties, were continued for many years and to some extent could be regarded as precursors of the Master of Statistics degree which was introduced in 1969 and first awarded in 1972.

Undergraduate courses were at first service courses which were part of other degree programmes (the earliest were in Wool Technology and Civil Engineering, in 1952). A major sequence with specialisation in Statistics in the B.A. and B.Sc. was introduced in 1956, with Honours programmes progressively being taught as numbers built up, with the first Honours graduate in 1963.

Supervision for research degrees was available quite early, the first M.Sc. being awarded in 1956, the first M.A. in 1969, and the first Ph.D. in 1964. The first D.Sc. in Statistics was awarded in 1977.

In 1948 there were two full-time academic staff with major interests in statistics in the then Department of Mathematics; 1959, when J. B. Douglas was appointed Associate Professor of Mathematical Statistics, there were 4. When Professor A.M. Hasofer was appointed in 1969 the staff amounted to 11. Associate Professor C. A. McGilchrist was promoted to Professor in 1993, and Professor W.T.M. Dunsmuir appointed in 1993. When Professor M. P. Wand joined the department in 2003 the full-time academic staff numbers swelled to their current level of fifteen.

From the beginning, as well as much effort in the Department being devoted to the development and teaching of statistical theory, there was substantial emphasis on the application of Statistics. Consequently, throughout its history there has been extensive utilization of the latest computing facilities in teaching, research and consultative activities.

Consultative work with industry, business, the public service and with research projects in other University units has always played an important role in helping focus the research activities of the Department and also in providing stimulation and direction to teaching. At one stage this was particularly reflected in the organisation of vacation employment for students majoring in Statistics - it remains an important source of projects for investigation by students (and staff) at every level. Further details are to be found in the report “A Brief History of the Department of Statistics, The University of New South Wales 1948-1983” by Jim Douglas.