The White House has announced President Joseph Biden awarded Berkeley Statistics alum Tamara Broderick, Ph.D. '14, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.  

Nearly 400 Federally Funded Early-Career Scientists were recognized across 14 participating agencies within the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Interior, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency, the intelligence community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Broderick was awarded the PECASE for her research with the Office of Naval Research and won an early Career Grant (ECG) from the Office of Naval Research in 2020. 

Broderick is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is a member of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). 

"A tremendous congratulations to Tamara on this prestigious and well-earned recognition," said Chair Haiyan Huang. 

While at Berkeley, Broderick was advised by Distinguished Professor Michael Jordan. Her thesis was titled "Clusters and Features from Combinatorial Stochastic Processes." Upon graduation, she was awarded the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and Citation for the Ph.D. student on the Berkeley campus, which showed the most significant promise in statistical research. 

 

Photo: tamarabroderick.com

-Alex Coughlin