IMS Fellow Kathryn Roeder has been elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. NAS membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.

Kathryn Roeder is Professor of Statistics and Computational Biology, and Vice Provost for Faculty, at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She earned her PhD in statistics in 1988 at Pennsylvania State University (her dissertation, supervised by Bruce G. Lindsay, was Method of Spacings for Semiparametric Inference), then she worked at Yale University for the next six years before moving to CMU in 1994. In 1997 she received both the COPSS Presidents’ Award and the Snedecor Award, and, in 1999, gave an IMS Medallion Lecture. In 2013, she received the Janet L. Norwood Award for outstanding achievement by a woman in statistical sciences. She said she joined CMU’s Computational Biology Department as a voting faculty member in 2004, “to encourage a bridge between statistics, machine learning, genetics and genomics.” She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as IMS.

She lists her research interests on her website: “A primary goal of my research group is to develop statistical tools for finding associations between patterns of genetic variation and complex disease. To solve biologically relevant problems, we utilize modern statistical methods such as high dimensional statistics, statistical machine learning, nonparametric methods and networks. Data arises from primarily from Next Generation Sequencing and gene expression arrays. Our methodological work is motivated by our studies of schizophrenia, autism and other genetic disorders.” See http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~roeder/index.html