Director of the Program in Data Analytics, Washington State University
“My life has been an exercise in serendipity and survival,” says Nairanjana Dasgupta. Her mother needed surgery, so she had a routine pregnancy test that revealed she was pregnant with Dasgupta at the age of 40+. Dasgupta’s mother had three healthy children and was strongly urged to terminate. The odds of Dasgupta’s survival weren’t great, but here she is.
She grew up on a small university campus (academic parents) in India close to the Himalayas, but had access to education and the arts. From early childhood, numbers spoke to her, and she could see patterns. “I loved both logic and word puzzles,” she said. When picking a major at 18, Dasgupta was torn between mathematics and English, so a family friend suggested statistics as an alternative. “India had a great culture in statistics and, though I had never taken a stats class before, I decided to try it out, took the admission test to Presidency College (my father’s alma mater), and was admitted. My 18-year-old self thought statistics sounded like fun,” says Dasgupta.
From her first class in statistics, Dasgupta knew she had made the correct choice, and her love affair with statistics and data has been steady and strong. After college, she decided to come to the US and chose the University of South Carolina because it was the first place to offer her a teaching assistantship. At graduate school orientation, she met a classmate and, less than a year later, they were married. “Serendipity at play again,” she says.
After earning her PhD, Washington State University was the first to offer her a tenure-track position. “And that was that,” Dasgupta says. At Washington State University, she went through the ranks of assistant, associate, and full professor and had two kids along the way.
“I absolutely love the fact that, as a statistician, I get to hear of problems from literally all disciplines,” says Dasgupta. She has collaborated on a multitude. From coming up with a design for the sensors of a “smart home” with a computer science group (before AI was a thing) to understanding decision-making of hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa with an anthropologist, she has enjoyed them all.
Dasgupta has been a distinguished professor since 2014 and an ASA Fellow since 2018. She was president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics in 2022 and has chaired the Committee for Women in Statistics since 2024. She was inducted into the Washington State Academy of Sciences in 2023 and promoted to Regents professor, the highest honor at Washington State University, and took over as the chair of mathematics and statistics. She is also the president-elect of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society.
Dasgupta wears several hats (e.g., mother, teacher, researcher, mentor, partner, and advocate) and continues to love all aspects of her life. She is most proud of her work in advocacy—for women, gender minorities, underserved populations. She is passionate about data literacy and has been advocating for it at all levels (see “Stepping into Data Literacy”).
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