Sarah (Sally) Newcomb Whitney Thurston (born April 28, 1956) [1] is an American biostatistician and environmental statistician whose research involves the application of Bayesian hierarchical modeling to problems in environmental health, including work on endocrine disruptors, the effects of mercury in fish on prenatal development, and the health effects of air pollution. She is a professor of biostatistics and a professor of environmental science in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. [2]
Thurston majored in biology at Oberlin College, graduating in 1978. After earning a master's degree in natural resources from Cornell University in 1991, she went to Harvard University for doctoral study in statistics. She earned a second master's degree in 1992 before completing her Ph.D. in 1997. [3] Her doctoral dissertation, Error Analysis of Food Stamp Microsimulation Models, was jointly advised by Alan M. Zaslavsky and Donald Rubin. [4]
She stayed at Harvard as a postdoctoral research fellow (1997–2000) and research associate (2000–2002) before moving to her present position at the University of Rochester in 2002. She added a second affiliation in oncology in 2005, and was tenured in 2008. [3]
Thurston is the daughter of mathematician Hassler Whitney. [5] [6] Her mother Mary Barnett Garfield was a granddaughter of Harry Augustus Garfield and great-granddaughter of James A. Garfield. [1]
Thurston became an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute in 2006. [3] She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, elected in 2019. [7]
Hassler Whitney was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes, and geometric integration theory.
Louise Marie Ryan is an Australian biostatistician, a distinguished professor of statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, president-elect of the International Biometric Society, and an editor-in-chief of the journal Statistics in Medicine. She is known for her work applying statistics to cancer and risk assessment in environmental health.
Mei-Ling Ting Lee is a Taiwanese-American biostatistician known for her research on microarrays. She is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Lifetime Data Analysis. She was president of the International Chinese Statistical Association for 2016.
Susmita Datta is an Indian biostatistician. She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, and is the former president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. She is also a musician who has published three CDs of Bengali folk songs.
Grace Elizabeth Kissling is an American biostatistician who works at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as chief statistician for the National Toxicology Program.
Yvonne Millicent Mahala Bishop was an English-born statistician who spent her working life in America. She wrote a "classic" book on multivariate statistics, and made important studies of the health effects of anesthetics and air pollution. Later in her career, she became the Director of the Office of Statistical Standards in the Energy Information Administration.
Peiyong "Annie" Qu is a Chinese-American statistician known for her work on estimating equations and semiparametric models. Her research interests also include longitudinal analysis, nonparametric statistics and robust statistics, missing data, and biostatistics.
Jeffrey Tullis Leek is an American biostatistician and data scientist working as a Vice President, Chief Data Officer, and Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He is an author of the Simply Statistics blog, and runs several online courses through Coursera, as part of their Data Science Specialization. His most popular course is The Data Scientist's Toolbox, which he instructed along with Roger Peng and Brian Caffo. Leek is best known for his contributions to genomic data analysis and critical view of research and the accuracy of popular statistical methods.
Amita Kalyanie Manatunga is a Sri Lankan biostatistician who works as a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, where she is also affiliated with the Winship Cancer Institute. Her research interests include survival analysis, inter-rater reliability, environmental epidemiology, and medical imaging of the kidneys.
Brisa N. Sánchez is a Mexican-American biostatistician and environmental epidemiologist, whose research has included work on the spatial analysis of fast food restaurants, on nutrition in schools, on the relation between the characteristics of neighborhoods and the health of their residents, on the water infrastructure in Mexico City, and on latent variable models in environmental statistics. She is the Dornsife Professor of Biostatistics at Drexel University.
Leslie Ain McClure is an American biostatistician. She is a Full professor of biostatistics at the Drexel University School of Public Health and was the inaugural Associate Director of Diversity for the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (2017–18).
Keumhee Carrière Chough is a Korean-Canadian statistician whose theoretical contributions include work on repeated measures design; she is co-editor of Analysis of Mixed Data: Methods & Application, and has also contributed to highly cited works on public health. She is a professor of mathematical and statistical sciences at the University of Alberta.
Rebecca Allana Hubbard is an American biostatistician whose research interests include observational studies and the use of electronic health record data in public health analysis and decision-making, accounting for the errors in this type of data. She is a professor of biostatistics at the Brown University School of Public Health.
Fang Liu is a Chinese-American statistician and data scientist whose research topics include differential privacy, statistical learning theory, Bayesian statistics, regularization, missing data, and applications in biostatistics. She is a professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Notre Dame.
Clarice Ring Weinberg is an American biostatistician and epidemiologist who works for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as principal investigator in the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch. Her research concerns environmental epidemiology, and its combination with genetics in susceptibility to disease, including running the Sister Study on how environmental and genetic effects can lead to breast cancer. She has also published highly cited research on fertility.
Susan Kathryn Gregurick is an American computational chemist. She is the associate director for data science at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Gregurick is the director of the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy.
Mingyao Li is a Chinese-American biostatistician and statistical geneticist known for her research on genetic factors related to heart disease, and as one of the creators of the ANNOVAR bioinformatics software tool. She is a professor of biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Fan Li is a Chinese-American biostatistician whose research includes causal inference and propensity score matching, and their application to comparative effectiveness research in health care. She is a professor in the Duke University Department of Statistical Science, with a secondary appointment in Duke's Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Robert L. Strawderman is an academic biostatistician and researcher who holds the Donald M. Foster, MD Distinguished Professorship in Biostatistics at the University of Rochester. He has served as chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology since 2012. Strawderman's principal research interests include semiparametric methods for missing and censored data and statistical learning methods for risk and outcome prediction. Contributions in numerous other areas include inference and variable selection in the areas of dynamic treatment regimes and causal inference in mediation analysis and for recurrent events.
Lu Wang is a Chinese-American biostatistician whose research topics have included causal inference, dynamic decision-making for medical treatments, missing data, and environmental health. She has also studied the correlation between mercury from seafood and autoimmune disease, and the benefits of providing improved transportation services for healthcare, as a member of the Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation. She is a professor of biostatistics and associate chair for research in biostatistics in the University of Michigan School of Public Health.