Understanding volcanoes is essential both for advancing knowledge of the dynamic processes that shape our planet and for ensuring public welfare and safety. Volcanic activity provides critical insights into systems that connect Earth’s surface to deep within the planet, and volcanoes pose some of the most unpredictable natural hazards. This project will improve how scientists interpret information about when and where volcanoes have erupted, information which is often incomplete and inconsistent. These insights will support the development of regional statistics to improve hazard assessment and forecasting, an urgent national need identified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. They will also clarify the temporal and spatial scales that drive volcanic behavior. To facilitate participation in science, the project will implement a two-part educational model. It will begin with a general education math course that engages a wide range of students and builds confidence and trust through fundamental, accessible ideas, followed by a second course where students practice framing questions using their newly learned mathematical tools. This emphasis on question-framing is inspired by the research itself, which advances volcanic interpretation by recasting complex Earth science problems as fundamental statistical questions, ones that could arise in an introductory math class. The goal of this project is to develop methods for extracting statistically rob