Dr. Rebecca Nugent is the Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science and the current Department Head for the Department of Statistics & Data Science at the Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Washington in 2006. Dr. Nugent is widely recognized as a national leader in data science education, sports analytics, and advocacy for expanding opportunities for women in STEM initiatives that span the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center and Women in Data Science. She is the founding director of innovative Corporate Capstone Program, connecting student-faculty teams with real-world data science challenges from industry, nonprofit, and government organizations.
Dr. Nugent’s research focuses on clustering and classification in high-dimensional and big-data contexts, particularly record linkage and public health applications, and on deploying low-barrier adaptive analytics platforms like ISLE to transform how data science is taught and studied. Among her awards are the American Statistical Association Waller Award for Innovation in Statistics Education as well as several university-level teaching and service recognition. She also contributes to national policy and scholarship as co-chair of a National Academies consensus study on improving data use in workforce acquisition and as a co-editor of the Springer Texts in Statistics series.