Affiliation
Professor and Associate Director for Data Science, School of Mathematical and Data Sciences, West Virginia University

Education:
PhD, Statistics, Colorado State University
MA, Economics, Vanderbilt University
BA, Independent Major, Grinnell College

Snehalata Huzurbazar was born in Ames, Iowa, while her father, V.S. Huzurbazar, was a Fulbright professor of statistics at Iowa State University. As she had no friends of her own at the time, her first birthday party was attended primarily by ISU statisticians; some reminded her of this almost three decades later at her first JSM. After Ames, Huzurbazar lived in Pune, India, where her father was the founding head of the mathematics and statistics department, later moving to Winnipeg, Canada, and finally Denver, Colorado.

Huzurbazar’s extended family was, and is, deeply entrenched in the mathematical and physical sciences; her rebellion was to avoid anything close Huzurbazar to STEM. She started college as a classics major, sampled various social sciences and Spanish, spent a year in Croatia learning Croatian while working as a nanny, and finished up college with an independent major (lacking sufficient credits in any discipline). She was admitted into a PhD program in economics and, for various reasons—including her mother’s premature death—failed the qualifying exams (twice) but finished a master’s project. She was a teaching assistant for economist Kathy Anderson (statistician R.L. Anderson’s daughter), who made an off-hand comment that a degree in statistics might be helpful for employment.

At the time, Huzurbazar’s father didn’t dare suggest this, given her lack of interest in STEM and especially her lack of focus and propensity for failure. However, within months of starting her master’s in statistics, something odd happened: She actually passionately enjoyed what she was doing and completed a PhD in statistics.

For the bulk of her career, Huzurbazar was faculty in statistics departments with a two-year appointment as the deputy director of SAMSI. In 2020, she developed a data science program at West Virginia University.

Over her career, while collaborating with colleagues from sedimentology to glaciology to evolutionary bioinformatics, Huzurbazar has learned to model and analyze different types of data while absorbing a lot of science. Like many in her generation, she is living in the midst of much change in statistics and navigating the growth of data science, the evolving demographics in workplaces (she has often been the ‘only’), the growing acceptance of the professional intertwined with the personal (especially for single mothers like herself), and the effects of harassment on people and the institutions where they work.

Though nonacademic, Huzurbazar considers her proudest achievement to be almost 20 years ago, when, after some campus sexual assault incidents, she initiated and obtained funding from the Department of Justice’s Grants to Combat Violence Against Women program. This created the University of Wyoming’s STOP Violence Program, which was later institutionalized. She personally knows women who stayed in college because of the program’s assistance. Huzurbazar collaborated with police chiefs and student health professionals while putting together the grant application and program and gained important perspective on communicating and leveraging the abilities and skills accumulated while meandering through various disciplines into statistics.