Students learn their research skills in a substantive field such as public health, climate science, marine or aquatic biology, land-use and development, social science, and population science, mining data from available websites such as the CRU, NREL, BOM and land-use data banks in Britain, the USA, Australia, and Thailand. They learn how to apply appropriate statistical methods, particularly those involving variation in time and space. These include generalized linear models (normal, logistic, Poisson and Gamma regression models), factor analysis and other multivariate procedures, GIS applications, and computational and graphical methods, and we develop new statistical methods where needed.

Our campus is located in beautiful Pattani province of southern Thailand, surrounded by wetland bird sanctuaries, rivers, mountains, waterfalls and beaches. It provides an idyllic & inexpensive place to live and study, undisturbed by big-city congestion, noise and pollution. The many tropical islands in the Andaman Sea are within a few hours drive, and we visit PSU's "sixth campus" in the mountains west of Chiang Mai (less than 2 hours direct flight on a budget airline) for an annual field trip.