Layla Mosama Parast Bartroff is an American biostatistician whose research involves surrogate markers, predictive modelling, survival analysis, causal inference, and health care quality. Formerly a senior statistician and co-director of the Center for Causal Inference at the RAND Corporation, she is an associate professor of statistics and data sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.[1][2] She is also a frequent newspaper and news magazine editorial writer on issues related to public health, supported as a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.[3]
Parast grew up in Texas,[2] as the daughter of two academics: her mother, Ann Roberts Parast, is a retired English professor at Texas State Technical College, and her father, Rudy M. Parast, is a mathematician affiliated with the Marine Military Academy. After undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Parast earned a master's degree in statistics at Stanford University.[4]
Her interest in biostatistics began with an epidemiology course taken during her master's program at Stanford.[2] She completed a Ph.D. in biostatistics at Harvard University in 2012.[1] Her dissertation, Landmark Prediction of Survival, was supervised by Tianxi Cai.[5][6]
After working at the RAND Corporation as a senior statistician and co-director of the Center for Causal Inference, Parast returned to the University of Texas at Austin as a faculty member, joining the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences as an associate professor in 2022.[1][2][7] Her husband, Jay Bartroff,[4] joined the same department at the same time, moving there from the University of Southern California.[2][7]
Parast was named as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, in the 2023 class of fellows.[8]