Rebecca Nugent
Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science (CMU)
Biography
Rebecca Nugent is the Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science and Head of the Carnegie Mellon Department of Statistics & Data Science. She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington, her M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Mathematics, Statistics, and Spanish from Rice University.
Dr. Nugent has expertise in designing and implementing data science/AI professional development programs for business leaders in industries including health care, finance, automotive/manufacturing, and life sciences. She was the faculty co-Director of the Moderna AI Academy and the Founding Director of the Statistics & Data Science Corporate Capstone program, an experiential learning initiative that matches groups of faculty and students with data science problems in industry, non-profits, and government organizations.
She has won several national and university teaching awards including the American Statistical Association Waller Award for Innovation in Statistics Education and serves as one of the co-editors of the Springer Texts in Statistics. She recently served as the co-chair for the National Academy of Sciences study on Improving Defense Acquisition Workforce Capability in Data Use and served on the NAS study on Envisioning the Data Science Discipline: The Undergraduate Perspective. Dr. Nugent has worked extensively in clustering and classification methodology with an emphasis on high-dimensional, big data problems and record linkage applications. Her current research focus is the development and deployment of low-barrier data analysis platforms that allow for adaptive instruction and the study of data science as a science.