Affiliation:
Professor and Pre-eminent Hire, Department of Biostatistics, University of Florida
Co-Director, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design Program (BERD), University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute
Adjunct Professor and University Distinguished Scholar, Department of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics, University of Louisville

Educational Background:
Postdoctoral Associate, Biostatistics, Emory University, 1995–1997
PhD, Statistics, University of Georgia, 1995
MS, Applied Statistics, University of Georgia, 1990
BSc, Physics, University of Calcutta, 1986

About Susmita
Datta was born in Kolkata, India. Her parents were displaced immigrants from what is now Bangladesh and suffered through many difficulties, which gave Susmita the courage and determination to go against the odds and thrive. Her primary and secondary schooling took place in an eclectic school for women built by a social reformer, encouraging Susmita’s desire to improve women’s lives through education, especially science, literature, drama, and music. Her musical heritage and training made her consider a career in music, but her passion for science won out and brought her into the world of physics, followed by statistics.

Susmita has worked with statistical modeling of data coming out of complex laboratory instruments. Her laboratory is also deeply involved in lipidomics, clustering and classification techniques, infectious disease modeling, statistical issues in population biology, systems biology, survival analysis, multi-state models, and big data analytics. She recently published Statistical Analysis of Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Lipidomics Data Using Mass Spectrometry. Susmita became interested in data science through her involvement with big and fat data. She is helping to develop an educational program in data science at her institution.

Susmita has been widely (>100) published in peer-reviewed journals. Her work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She serves on the advisory board of the NSF/CBMS Regional Research Conferences in Mathematics and has served on the editorial board of many statistics and bioinformatics journals. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Briefings in Bioinformatics and the IISA Springer book series.

Susmita enthusiastically promotes women in STEM fields and has served as president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. She is presently appointed to the ASA Committee on Women in Statistics, was the founding executive committee member of the Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference, and is the chair of the curriculum committee for the school of public health and health sciences at the University of Florida.

Susmita’s love of music has brought her back to the stage. She recently produced two CDs in Kolkata and plans to pursue music alongside academics. Above all, she wants to build a future with students fairly and kindly pursuing research in interdisciplinary statistics and data science.