Daniela M. Witten is an American biostatistician. She is a professor and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

. Her research investigates the use of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to understand high-dimensional data.

Early life and education

Witten studied mathematics and biology at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, graduating in 2005. She remained there for her postgraduate research, earning a master's degree in statistics in 2006. She was awarded the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

Gertrude Mary Cox Gertrude Mary Cox (January 13, 1900 – October 17, 1978) was an American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statist ...

Scholarship in 2008. Her doctoral thesis, ''A penalized matrix decomposition, and its applications'' was supervised by

Robert Tibshirani Robert Tibshirani (born July 10, 1956) is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University. He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1985 to 1998. In his work, he develops statistical to ...

. She worked with

Trevor Hastie Trevor John Hastie (born 27 June 1953) is an American statistician and computer scientist. He is currently serving as the John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Hastie is known for ...

on canonical correlation analysis. She co-authored ''An Introduction to Statistical Learning'' in 2013.

Research and career

Witten applies statistical machine learning to personalised medical treatments and decoding the genome. She uses machine learning to analyse data sets in

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developme ...

and

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

. She is worried about increasing amounts of data in biomedical sciences. She was appointed to the

as Genentech Endowed Professor in 2010. Witten contributed to the 2012 report ''Evolution of Translational Omics'' that provided best practise in translating

omics The branches of science known informally as omics are various disciplines in biology whose names end in the suffix '' -omics'', such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, phenomics and transcriptomics. Omics aims at the collect ...

research into a clinic. She is an associate editor for the ''

Journal of the American Statistical Association The ''Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA)'' is the primary journal published by the American Statistical Association, the main professional body for statisticians in the United States. It is published four times a year in Mar ...

''.

Recognition

She was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

in 2020. She was named to the 2022 class of Fellows of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

, for "substantial contributions to the field of statistical machine learning, with applications to biology; and for communicating the fundamental ideas in the field to a broad audience". She was awarded an NIH Director's Early Independence Award in 2011. She was awarded the

David P. Byar Young Investigator Award for her work ''Penalized Classification Using Fisher’s Linear Discriminant'' in 2011. Her book ''An Introduction to Statistical Learning'' won a ''

Technometrics Technometrics is a journal of statistics for the physical, chemical, and engineering sciences, published quarterly since 1959 by the American Society for Quality and the American Statistical Association. Statement of purpose The purpose of ''Tech ...

'' Ziegel Award in 2014. She won an Elle magazine ''Genius Award'' in 2012. In 2013 she won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. She was named in the

Forbes 30 Under 30 ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 is a set of lists of people under 30 years old issued annually by ''Forbes'' magazine and some of its regional editions. The American lists recognize 600 business and industry figures, with 30 selected in twenty industries ...

Science & Healthcare category in 2012, 2013 and 2014. In 2015 Witten was awarded the

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

Raymond J. Carroll Young Investigator Award. In 2018 she was named a

Simons Foundation The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 by Marilyn and Jim Simons with offices in New York City. As one of the largest charitable organizations in the US with assets of over $5 billion in 2022, the foundation's mission ...

Investigator and was the recipient of the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2022.

Personal life

Daniela is the younger sister of Ilana B. Witten, the older sister of Rafael Witten, and the daughter of the physicists Chiara Nappi and

Edward Witten Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, q ...

. She is married to software engineer Ari Steinberg.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Witten, Daniela Women statisticians American statisticians Stanford University alumni University of Washington faculty Biostatisticians American science writers Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people)