The Graduate Program in Biometrics (Master's) at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE) was created in 1997 in the former Department of Physics and Mathematics and was recognized by CAPES in 2001. In 2008, it was renamed the Graduate Program in Biometrics and Applied Statistics (PPGBEA), a name that best reflects the Program's purpose. Also in 2008, the Doctorate in Biometrics and Applied Statistics was approved, beginning in the first semester of 2009. Currently, the Program has a CAPES rating of 5 and is physically linked to the Department of Statistics and Computer Science (DEINFO), which emerged in 2005 through a project in the Statistics area, aiming to separate these areas from the Department of Physics and Mathematics to better meet the needs of UFRPE's undergraduate programs.
The creation of PPGBEA was based on the premise of filling a gap in Biometrics and Applied Statistics professionals at the Postgraduate level, given that the Northeast Region has several higher education institutions that train professionals in the agricultural, biological and human areas, where the application of Biometrics and Statistics has been widely requested, given the large number of problems involving the collection, processing and analysis of data from various phenomena in the aforementioned sciences.
Since its inception, the Program has graduated 232 master's and 105 doctoral graduates as of December 2024, who work in various segments of Brazilian society. Our Program graduates are professors of Statistics, Applied Statistics, and Mathematics at various educational and research institutions in the Northeast region and throughout Brazil. Our faculty has alumni from UFRN, FUFSE, UEPB, UFPB, UFCG, UFPE, UFRPE, UFBA, UNEB, UFCA, UNIVASF, UFS, as well as federal institutes in CE, PB, PE, among others.
In 2014, a Dinter was approved between the Federal University of Sergipe (Host) and the Graduate Program in Biometrics and Statistics/UFRPE (Sponsor). Activities began in April 2015, contributing to the qualification of the host institution's faculty and to the growth of statistics research and teaching in the Northeast region and Brazil. The Dinter was completed in 2019. Of the eight initial students, five completed their doctorates. The highly qualified faculty received without requiring long-term absences of its faculty was of great value to the host institution. From this perspective, this also represents a significant economic impact, since there was no need to hire substitute faculty to fill the vacancies.
Given its interdisciplinary nature, the PPGBEA currently boasts, through its faculty, a large research collaboration network within the institution itself and with national institutions in various regions of Brazil and abroad. The program has been building a solid international presence through doctoral fellowships and ongoing exchanges with international researchers. The research conducted by faculty in the Biometrics and Applied Statistics Program focuses primarily on understanding and explaining the various natural phenomena studied, most of which exhibit complex behavior. Due to this complexity, classical modeling and analysis methodologies are sometimes insufficient. However, due to the eclectic profile of this program's faculty, with backgrounds in statistics, mathematics, computer science, statistical physics, and various agricultural fields, such as agronomy, fisheries, forestry, and soils, it is possible to understand the studied phenomena through classical and emerging methods (e.g., signal analysis, neural networks, image analysis, pattern recognition, physical-statistical modeling, etc.) and phenomenon-specific models, supported by high-performance computer simulations. This characteristic represents a distinctive feature of the Biometrics and Applied Statistics Program (the only one in the Northeast) in relation to the other exact science programs (five throughout Brazil) that are part of the Agricultural Sciences Committee I, and a significant contribution to the scientific and technological development of Agricultural Sciences and related fields. Thus, the fact that we are working at the interface between the agricultural and exact sciences justifies the composition of the program's faculty by researchers with training in several of these areas. Consequently, the concept of specific training for the Program's area of concentration should include all our faculty (tenured and collaborating). Indeed, the transfer of methodologies from other areas of knowledge to the agricultural sciences (particularly numerical simulations and computational modeling) should bring significant scientific benefits in the long term.
We believe that with the advancement of computational devices and new quantitative techniques, we can expect an increase in the number and importance of projects related to our Program's area. In particular, we believe that the future transformation of agricultural sciences from a phenomenological branch to the exact sciences (in the sense of cause-and-effect predictive power) depends heavily on the recognition of this research direction. The prospects for the evolution of our program arise from the need to strengthen the application of quantitative methods in agricultural sciences and to better understand the environment, which is widely recognized nationally and internationally. Significant efforts are being invested in this direction in Brazil and worldwide, and in this sense, the performance of programs like ours can be seen as strategic.
Finally, current trends in agricultural science, with the increasing use of modern and sophisticated statistical and computational techniques (e.g., for precision agriculture, monitoring carbon and nutrient cycling, or the use of pattern recognition techniques for improving agricultural production), ensure the future growth, significant importance, and visibility of our program within its reach, both in Brazil and internationally. Regarding international challenges, our Program has undertaken several initiatives to strengthen its international presence. Taking advantage of its participation in the Internationalization Program (PrINT/CAPES/UFRPE), which has already resulted in collaborations with the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, Austria), Harvard University (USA), and Université Aix-Marseille (FRA), through postdoctoral fellowships and work assignments; Salford University, University of Edinburgh (UK), and the International Institute for Applied System Analysis, Luxenburg (AUS) (work assignments abroad); Harvard University (USA); Texas A&M University and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (ESP) (sandwich doctorate abroad, approved in 2019 and which, due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, have not been put into practice to date).
In addition to the partnerships initiated by Print, throughout the four-year period, the Program has already maintained partnerships in research and scientific production with Portland State University (USA), Louisiana State University (USA), University of Antwerp (Belgium), Boston University (USA), Texas A&M University (USA), Universidad Nacional del Sur (ARG) and Appalachian State University (USA), Centro Nacional de Sanidad Agropecuária-CENSA (CUB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (ESP), Universiti of Novi Sad (SRB), Research Institute for Development (FRA), etc. This effort aims at the internationalization of the PPGBEA and the permanent flow of faculty and students from our Program and foreign institutions in research and/or academic cooperation, postdoctoral internships, and sandwich doctorates.