Tamara Ann Broderick is an American computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works on machine learning and Bayesian inference.^[1]

Education and early career

Broderick is from Parma Heights, Ohio.^[3] She attended Laurel School and graduated in 2003.^[4] Whilst at high school she took part in the inaugural Massachusetts Institute of Technology Women's Technology Program.^[5] She studied mathematics at Princeton University, earning a bachelor's degree in 2007.^[3] She was a Marshall scholar, allowing her to pursue graduate research at the University of Cambridge.^[3] She was a runner-up in the Association for Women in Mathematics Alice T. Shafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics.^[3][6] She was co-president of the Princeton Math Club and organised a competition for high school maths teams.^[3] She won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for the highest academic average at Princeton University.^[7] During her undergraduate degree, Broderick worked on dark matter haloes with Rachel Mandelbaum.^[8] Broderick moved to the United Kingdom for her graduate studies, earning a Master of Advanced Studies for completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge in 2009.^[9][10] Her Master's thesis looked at the Nomon selection method, improving the efficiency of communications.^[11][12] She returned to America in 2009, joining University of California, Berkeley for her Master's and PhD.^[10] Her graduate research was supported by the Berkeley Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Fellowship.^[7] Her PhD thesis Clusters and features from combinatorial stochastic processes looked at clustering and speeding up the analysis of large, streaming data sets.^[13][2] In 2013 she was selected for the Berkeley EECS Rising Stars conference.^[14]

Research and career

Broderick joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in 2015.^[14] She is interested in Bayesian statistics and Graphical models.^[15] She was the recipient of a Google Faculty Research Grant and International Society for Bayesian Analysis Lifetime Members Junior Researcher Award.^[16] She was awarded an Army Research Office young investigator program award to investigate machine-learning to quantify uncertainty in data analysis.^[17] Broderick is also Alfred P. Sloan Foundation scholar.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Academic service

In 2018, Broderick spoke at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science Women in Data Science conference.^[22] She spoke about Bayesian inference at the 2018 International Conference on Machine Learning.^[23] She led a three-day Masterclass on machine learning at University College London in June 2018.^[24][25] Broderick is a scientific advisor for AI.Reverie and WiML (Women in Machine Learning).^[26][27] She has developed a high-school level introduction to machine learning with the Women's Technology Program (WTP).^[28] Software she has developed is available on her website.^[29]

Awards and honors

Broderick was awarded the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis Savage Award for her doctoral thesis.^[30][31] She was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to scale her machine learning techniques.^[32][28] She was a 2021 Leadership Academy winner of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.^[33]