Susan Holmes
Professor of Statistics
Concentration Advising in:
Academic Appointments
Professor, Statistics
Member, Bio-X
Member, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
Member, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
Member and Chair (2010-2012), Science Board, NimBioS (2007 - 2012)
Science Boards, Fields Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences (2012 - 2015)
Council Member, Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2018 - 2021)
Scientific Advisory Board, Sydney Mathematics Research Institute (2018 - Present)
Honors & Awards
CASBS Fellow, Center for the Advanced study of the Behavioral Sciences (2017-2018)
Breiman Lecturer, N(eur)IPS (December, 2016)
Fellow, Fields Institute in Mathematical Sciences, Toronto, Canada (2015)
Director's Transformative Research Award, NIH (2013)
John Henry Samter University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Stanford (2012)
Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, IMS (2005)
Trained in the French school of Data Analysis in Montpellier, Susan Holmes has been working in non parametric multivariate statistics applied to Biology since 1985. She has taught at MIT, Harvard and was an Associate Professor of Biometry at Cornell before moving to Stanford in 1998. She created the Thinking Matters class: Breaking Codes and Finding patterns and likes working on big messy data sets, mostly from the areas of Immunology, Cancer Biology and Microbial Ecology. Her theoretical interests include applied probability, MCMC (Monte Carlo Markov chains), Graph Limit Theory, Differential Geometry and the topology of the space of Phylogenetic Trees. She wrote the book Modern Statistics for Modern Biology with Wolfgang Huber from EMBL and teaches the material as a crash course (BIOS221) regularly every year. Her current focus is improving the statistical analyses and reproducibility of data in perturbation studies of the Human Microbiome.