The IMS will provide funding for prominent probabilists and statisticians to give lectures in developing countries, targeted at researchers and graduate students. Such visits will benefit a large number of researchers and graduate students in developing countries who cannot afford to travel overseas for scientific meetings. The lecturer will give approximately three lectures to faculty, students and a large audience. The IMS will fully fund round trip airfare from a relevant point of origin to the host institution. Host institutions are expected to cover accommodation and local expenses.

The University of the Philippines hosted the first IMS Lecture Program in August 2004 with David Donoho of the Statistics Department of Stanford University as the IMS Lecturer. Professor Donoho, an expert on wavelet analysis and its applications, delivered two lectures, The Romance of Hidden Components and Model Selection and Penalization. About 200 undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members from the School of Statistics and the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science attended both lectures.

The second IMS Lecture Program was given in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in January 2005 by Thomas Kurtz, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In Hanoi, Professor Kurtz visited the Institute of Mathematics in the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology and the Hanoi University of Science, lecturing on Approximation for stochastic differential equations and Particle representations for population models. In Ho Chi Minh City, the lectures were presented at the University of Natural Sciences.

Appropriate host institutions are located in developing countries listed at: https://www.imstat.org/designated-countries/