The American Public Health Association (APHA) has named Daniela Witten, professor in statistics and biostatistics at the University of Washington and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics, the winner of the 2019 Mortimer Spiegelman Award. This award honors a statistician who has made outstanding contributions to statistical methodology and its applications in public health.

Daniela Witten’s work focuses on statistical learning from complex high-dimensional data. Her methodological work is motivated by collaborations in a number of fields, including genomics, neuroscience, microbial ecology, and pathology.

Rob Tibshirani, professor of biomedical data science and statistics at Stanford University, who has collaborated with Witten, said, “Daniela is a rare researcher with the creativity to invent new statistical tools, and the scientific sense to know how and when to apply them in a way that can impact public health.”

Daniela Witten is invited to present her research at this year’s APHA conference, to be held November 2–6 in Philadelphia (https://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual), where she will be presented with the award by last year’s recipient.