Daniela Witten

Witten studied mathematics and biology at Stanford University, graduating in 2005. She remained there for her postgraduate research, earning a master's degree in statistics in 2006.[6][7] She was awarded the American Statistical Association Gertrude Mary Cox Scholarship in 2008.[8] Her doctoral thesis, A penalized matrix decomposition, and its applications was supervised by Robert Tibshirani.[3][9][10] She worked with Trevor Hastie on canonical correlation analysis.[11] At Stanford University she won several awards, including a Presidential Scholarship and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.[12] She co-authored An Introduction to Statistical Learning in 2013, a widely used textbook that is now in its seventh printing.[1] The book won a Technometrics Ziegel Award in 2014.[13]

Witten applies statistical machine learning to personalised medical treatments and decoding the genome.[14] She uses machine learning to analyse data sets in neuroscience and genomics.[15] She is worried about increasing amounts of data in biomedical sciences.[16]

She was appointed to the University of Washington as Genetech Endowed Professor in 2010.[17] She was awarded an NIH Director's Early Independence Award in 2011.[18] She was awarded the American Statistical Association David P. Byar Young Investigator Award for her work Penalized Classification Using Fisher’s Linear Discriminant in 2011.[19] Witten contributed to the 2012 report Evolution of Translational Omics that provided best practise in translating omics research into a clinic.[20][21] She won an Elle magazine Genius Award in 2012.[22] In 2013 she won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.[23] Her group have developed a range of open access software packages.[24] She has appeared in a Big Data to Knowledge webinar.[25] She delivered a TEDTalk at the University of Washington entitled Cancer by Numbers.[26]

She won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2013, allowing her to develop new statistical methods for graphical modelling.[27] She became a PopTech Science Fellow in 2013.[14] She was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science & Healthcare category in 2012, 2013 and 2014.[28][29][30] In 2015 Witten was awarded the Texas A&M University Raymond J. Carroll Young Investigator Award.[31] In 2018 she was named a Simons Foundation Investigator.[32] She is an associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association.[33]

Witten's work has been featured in Forbes magazine, Elle magazine and on NPR.[34][35] She has discussed big data with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[36] She was named one of the 10 Scientists Rocking Our World by HowStuffWorks.[37] In 2018 she was celebrated by the American Statistical Association as being one of the top women in data science.[38]

She was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2020.[39]

Daniela is the younger sister of Ilana B. Witten and daughter of the physicists Chiara Nappi and Edward Witten.[37] On August 17, 2008, she married Ari Steinberg, a software engineer and manager at Facebook in Palo Alto, California. They have two children, born in 2014[40] and 2015.[41]