Affiliation
National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (INRAE)

Education
HDR, Applied Mathematics, Universite d’Evry-Val-d’Essonne
PhD and MS, Statistics, Purdue University

Andrea Rau has always loved learning. Originally from Minot, North Dakota, she enjoyed mathematics classes as a kid but really thrived when they were balanced with creative activities, especially music. Her grandfather was endlessly curious about science and computers, and he was the first to introduce her to simple BASIC programming code on their trusty Apple IIC. She immediately found coding appealing, particularly how it called for a mix of logical and creative thinking (and provided a good excuse to play games).

 After high school, Rau attended Saint Olaf College in Minnesota. She initially declared herself an art history major, but eventually decided to double major in mathematics and French. After a summer research experience for undergraduates in topology, something still seemed to be missing. It was not until her junior year, when she participated in a month-long biostatistics practicum, that she started to understand real-world problems were what most excited her.

During that project, she worked with data from the National Bone Marrow Donor Program, an opportunity that was immensely motivating and rewarding to her. She had not yet taken a single statistics class (and may have actually asked a project partner, “What’s a p-value?”), but she quickly filled the remainder of her bachelor’s degree with statistics courses and went on to earn a master’s in applied statistics and PhD in statistics at Purdue University.

Rau’s PhD work focused on applied questions, combining statistics with creative (and bilingual) thinking. Her doctoral research centered on identifying networks from time-course gene expression data. While cosupervised by American and French researchers Rebecca W. Doerge, Jean-Louis Foulley, and Florence Jaffrézic, Rau shared her time between academic labs in both Indiana and France. She accepted a permanent researcher position near Paris at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (INRAE) after graduating and made France her permanent home.

Throughout her career, collaborations with biologists, bioinformaticians, and fellow statisticians have helped orient Rau’s research toward the development of sound and practical statistical tools with a single goal: to answer biologically meaningful questions. She enjoys being at this interface of statistics and biology, translating complex ideas between fields. She also strives to develop and maintain open-source R software packages to facilitate the use of her methods by the broader community.

To live up to the excellent example set by her own advisers, Rau is proud of the time and energy she invests in mentoring students. She enjoys participating in data science outreach activities for children and recently had the opportunity to teach a group of elementary school kids about collecting data, discovering patterns, and drawing histograms. In her free time, she loves playing and imagining new stories with her 8-year-old daughter, running with her Australian shepherd Bella, and smashing overheads on the tennis court.