Daniela Witten


Daniela M. Witten is an American biostatistician. She is a professor and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the use of machine learning to understand high-dimensional data.

Early life and education

Witten studied Mathematics and Biological Sciences at Stanford University, graduating in 2005. She won the Stanford University Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research. She remained there for her postgraduate research, earning a Masters in Statistics in 2006, having switched major from foreign languages. She was awarded the American Statistical Association Gertrude Mary Cox Scholarship in 2008. Her doctoral thesis, A penalized matrix decomposition, and its applications was supervised by Robert Tibshirani. She worked with Trevor Hastie on canonical correlation analysis. At Stanford University she won several awards, including a Presidential Scholarship and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. She published An Introduction to Statistical Learning in 2013, a widely used textbook that is now in its seventh edition. The book won a Technometrics Ziegel Award in 2014.

Research and career

Witten applies statistical machine learning to personalised medical treatments and decoding the genome. She uses machine learning to analyse data sets in neuroscience and genomics. She is worried about increasing amounts of data in biomedical sciences.
She was appointed to the University of Washington as Genetech Endowed Professor in 2010. She was awarded an NIH Director's Early Independence Award in 2011. She was awarded the American Statistical Association David P. Byar Young Investigator Award for her work Penalized Classification Using Fisher’s Linear Discriminant in 2011. Witten contributed to the 2012 report Evolution of Translational Omics that provided best practise in translating omics research into a clinic. She won an Elle magazine Genius Award in 2012. In 2013 she won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. Her group have developed a range of open access software packages. She has appeared in a Big Data to Knowledge webinar. She delivered a TEDTalk at the University of Washington entitled Cancer by Numbers.
She won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2013, allowing her to develop new statistical methods for graphical modelling. She became a PopTech Science Fellow in 2013. She was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science & Healthcare category in 2012, 2013 and 2014. In 2015 Witten was awarded the Texas A&M University Raymond J. Carroll Young Investigator Award. In 2018 she was named a Simons Foundation Investigator. She is an associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Public engagement and recognition

Witten's work has been featured in Forbes magazine, Elle magazine and on NPR. She has discussed big data with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was named one of the 10 Scientists Rocking Our World by HowStuffWorks. In 2018 she was celebrated by the American Statistical Association as being one of the top women in data science.
She was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2020.

Personal life

Daniela is the younger sister of Ilana B. Witten and daughter of the physicists Chiara Nappi and Edward Witten. On August 17, 2008, she married Ari Steinberg, a software engineer and manager at Facebook in Palo Alto, California. They have two children, born in 2014 and 2015.