Sophie Schbath (born 1969) is a French statistician whose research concerns the statistics of pattern matching in strings and formal languages, particularly as applied to genomics. She is a director of research for the French National Institute for Research in Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE), and a former president of the French BioInformatics Society.

Education and career

Schbath was born on 19 December 1969 in Nantes. She earned a master's degree in stochastic modeling and statistics in 1992 from Paris-Sud University,^[1] and completed a Ph.D. in 1995 at Paris Descartes University. Her dissertation was Étude asymptotique du nombre d'occurrences d'un mot dans une chaîne de Markov et application à la recherche de mots de fréquence exceptionnelle dans les séquences d'ADN.^[1][2] She earned a habilitation in 2003 at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne.^[1]

After postdoctoral research in 1996 at the University of Southern California, Schbath became a researcher for INRAE. She became a director of research in 2006, and director of research (1st class) in 2018. She was president of the French BioInformatics Society from 2010 to 2016.^[1]

Books

Schbath is the coauthor of the book ADN, mots et modèles, with S. Robin and F. Rodolphe, BELIN, 2003, translated into English as DNA, Words and Models: Statistics of Exceptional Words, Cambridge University Press, 2005.^[3]

She is also one of the contributors to the book Applied Combinatorics on Words, which lists its author as the collective pseudonym M. Lothaire.^[4]