While working full time and raising a child, Grace Wahba earned advanced degrees, completing her PhD at Stanford. She pioneered smoothing splines, shaping modern nonparametric regression and leaving a lasting imprint on data analysis and machine learning.
smoothing splines
Grace Wahba
In 2025 Grace Wahba was awarded the International Prize in Statistics in recognition of her groundbreaking work on smoothing splines, which has transformed modern data analysis and machine learning.