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Sarkar, Abhra
No

Abhra Sarkar

Associate Professor
Department of Statistics and Data Sciences



abhra.sarkar@utexas.edu

Phone: 512-232-3674

Office Location
WEL 5.246

Postal Address
105 E 24TH ST
AUSTIN, TX 78712

Abhra Sarkar joined The University of Texas at Austin faculty in 2017 as an Assistant Professor. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Duke University. His research interests center around the development of novel statistical approaches that aid in the study of complex real-world phenomena and provide new insights into related scientific queries while also having much broader general utility. These problems arise in diverse application areas, including especially in nutritional epidemiology, auditory, and vocal communication neuroscience. Dr. Sarkar is a 2018 recipient of the Mitchell Prize, and his work has been funded by the NSF, NIH, and ASA, among others. 

 

Ph.D., Statistics, Texas A&M University, 2014

My research interests center around the development of novel statistical approaches that aid in the study of complex real-world phenomena and provide new insights into related scientific queries. These problems arise in diverse application areas, including nutritional epidemiology, auditory and vocal communication neuroscience, and disease epidemiology. My research is fundamentally application-driven, intensive collaborations with scientists making up a significant component of my work. My overarching goal is to obtain novel statistical methods that improve results and practice in an initial motivating area while having much broader general utility. I enjoy, in particular, developing sophisticated Bayesian nonparametric methods that accommodate a wide range of data generating processes, adapting to different levels of data complexity and potentially automating various aspects of the analysis, including feature extraction, selection of variables, quantification of model uncertainty and testing hypotheses of interest. My research has resulted in highly efficient Bayesian nonparametric methods for measurement error problems and analyses of structured sequential and longitudinal data. These methods have appealing theoretical properties and practical advantages, exhibiting substantial gains in performance compared with existing approaches under a wide range of scenarios.