A chaired professorship, or an endowed chair, is a special professorial (faculty) position.  What makes such a professorship so special?  First of all, the professor who occupies such a position is especially selected to provide leadership in research or other scholarly endeavors in the field, which in our case would be statistics. To be selected as a chaired professor, a person must usually be a recognized national or world leader in the field.  A chaired professor is not usually the department chairperson or head, and hence does not spend time running the department.  Instead, a chaired professor spends his or her time (other than performing teaching duties) performing top-quality scholarly work, as well providing guidance to more junior faculty members in their research projects.  The second thing that is special about a chair professorship is that the salary for the person occupying this position is funded at least in part by a special fund rather than by the usual faculty salary pool of the department.  Our goal is to raise sufficient money to fund a chaired professorship in statistics as described here.