Tamara Broderick

Timeline

1. 2002–2009

   Mathematics at Princeton and Cambridge

   As a high school student from Ohio, she joins the first class of MIT's Women's Technology Program in 2002, and she earns a mathematics degree at Princeton in 2007. A Marshall Scholar at Cambridge, she completes a master of advanced study in mathematics in 2008 and an MPhil in physics in 2009. There she works with David MacKay on Nomon, an interface that lets people with extreme motor impairments type and use graphical interfaces.

2. 2009–2014

   A Berkeley statistics PhD

   She moves to the University of California, Berkeley in 2009, completes a master's in computer science in 2013, and earns a PhD in statistics in 2014 in Michael I. Jordan's lab. Her doctoral research in Bayesian nonparametrics, collected in the thesis "Clusters and features from combinatorial stochastic processes", speeds up the analysis of large, streaming data sets.

3. 2015

   Assistant professor at MIT

   She joins MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2015 as the ITT Career Development Assistant Professor, and she works for the new Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. She also wins the 2015 Savage Award, given for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in Bayesian theory and methods.

4. 2017–2018

   Army, NSF and Sloan awards

   She wins an Army Research Office Young Investigator award and a Google Faculty Research Award in 2017, then an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship and an Amazon Research Award in 2018. By 2019, her group is compressing very large data sets into much smaller weighted ones that give almost the same answers as the full data, with provable guarantees.

5. 2020–2021

   A data-dropping robustness metric

   In 2020, she, Ryan Giordano and Rachael Meager release a paper on the Approximate Maximum Influence Perturbation, a metric that estimates how small a fraction of data must be removed to change a study's conclusions. It shows that results of several influential economics papers can be overturned by removing less than 1% of the sample, and her group applies the idea to a randomized microcredit study. She wins an Office of Naval Research Early Career Grant in 2020 and joins the COPSS Leadership Academy in 2021.

6. 2023–2024

   Tenure at MIT

   MIT grants her tenure in EECS in 2023, one of nine engineers tenured across the School of Engineering. By March 2024, her group has worked with oceanographers on a machine-learning model that predicts ocean currents more accurately, and with specialists in degenerative disease on a single-switch tool for severely motor-impaired computer users.

7. 2024–2025

   IMS Fellow and a PECASE

   She is named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2024. In January 2025, she receives the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, through the Office of Naval Research, for her work on robust machine learning, and she wins the 2025 Burgess and Elizabeth Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at MIT.

8. As of October 2026

   Associate professor at MIT

   She is an associate professor with tenure in MIT's EECS department, affiliated with LIDS, IDSS and the Statistics and Data Science Center, and she teaches Bayesian Modeling and Inference in Spring 2026. In December 2025, her group announces a method that gives valid confidence intervals for data that vary across space, such as air pollution and precipitation, presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.