Mari Palta

Mari Soekõrv Palta is a Swedish biostatistician, known for her research on sleep apnea. She is a professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, vice-chair of Population Health Sciences, and director of graduate studies.[1] She is the author of Quantitative Methods in Population Health: Extensions of Ordinary Regression (Wiley, 2003).[2]

Palta studied mathematics, physics, and English at Lund University. After earning a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Minnesota, she remained at Minnesota for a PhD in biostatistics (1977) and postdoctoral work in epidemiology.[1] Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Richard McHugh, was Sample Size Determination for Clinical Trials.[3] She taught at the University of Iowa from 1979 until 1982, when she joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a research scientist. She became a faculty member at Wisconsin in 1987.[1]

Palta was president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics for 2002, and chaired the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association from 2008 to 2010.[1]

She has been a fellow of the American Statistical Association since 2004.[1]