UW’s Daniela Witten receives prestigious COPSS Presidents’ Award

Daniela Witten, professor of biostatistics and statistics at University of Washington and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics, has received the prestigious 2022 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS).

Daniela Witten

Daniela Witten

The COPSS Presidents' Award is the highest honor in the field of statistics, and is given annually to a statistician under the age of 41 in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the field.

"I’m immensely grateful to the statistical community for this recognition, and for this career that is so fulfilling scientifically, professionally, and personally," said Witten.

Witten is known for her substantial contributions to statistical machine learning, with applications to biology, and for communicating the fundamental ideas in the field to a broad audience.

Witten award was announced at the recent Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). The five societies that sponsor the award include the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC), the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society (ENAR), and the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society (WNAR).


Daniela Witten is a professor of statistics and biostatistics at University of Washington, and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair in Mathematical Statistics. She develops statistical machine learning methods for high-dimensional data, with a focus on unsupervised learning. Daniela is the recipient of an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Simons Investigator Award in Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems, and the Mortimer Spiegelman Award. She is also a co-author of the popular textbook Introduction to Statistical Learning.