Susan Holmes

Trained in the French school of Data Analysis in Montpellier, Susan Holmes has been working in non parametric multivariate statistics applied to Biology since 1985. She has taught at MIT, Harvard and was an Associate Professor of Biometry at Cornell before moving to Stanford in 1998. She teaches the Thinking Matters class: Breaking Codes and Finding patterns and likes working on big messy data sets, mostly from the areas of Immunology, Cancer Biology and Microbial Ecology. Her theoretical interests include applied probability, MCMC (Monte Carlo Markov chains), Graph Limit Theory, Differential Geometry and the topology of the space of Phylogenetic Trees.

Academic Appointments

• Professor, Statistics
• Member, Bio-X
• Member, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
• Member, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute

Administrative Appointments

• CoDirector, Mathematical and Computational Sciences IDP (2002 - 2017)
• Director, VIGRE program in Statistics (2005 - 2014)
• Professor, Member, BioX (2003 - Present)

Honors & Awards

• CASBS Fellow, Center for the Advanced study of the Behavioral Sciences (2017-2018)
• Breiman Lecturer, NIPS (December, 2016)
• Fellow, Fields Institute in Mathematical Sciences, Toronto, Canada (2015)
• Director's Transformative Research Award, NIH (2013)
• John Henry Samter University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford (2012)
• Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, IMS (2005)

Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations

• Member and Chair (2010-2012), Science Board, NimBioS (2007 - 2012)
• Science Boards, Fields Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences (2012 - 2015)
• Council Member, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2018 - Present)

Program Affiliations

• Symbolic Systems Program