Roeder Named Among World’s Most Highly Cited Researchers

Kathryn Roeder , UPMC Professor of Statistics and Life Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, was named as one of the world's most highly cited in the sciences, according to a list published by Clarivate Analytics. "I have made a career of communicating complex ideas as simply as possible. People are impressed by complicated papers, but they cite work they understand," said Roeder. "For me it is more important that my work make an impact on the broader scientific community." Roeder's work focuses on developing new statistical tools to explore large genetic datasets to identify causal genes that increase the risk for genetic disorders, like autism and schizophrenia. Her work spans bioinformatics, biostatistics, clustering and unsupervised methods, high-dimension statistics, neuroscience, nonparametric methods and statistical machine learning. "Kathryn's work has had an enormous impact on many fields," said Christopher Genovese, head of the Department of Statistics & Data Science. "She has helped to identify the genetic variations that lead to complex diseases and has developed fundamental statistical methods that allow biologists to draw sharper inferences from genetic data." The Highly Cited Researchers list represents scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated significant influence through publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade.