Purnamrita (Purna) Sarkar joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2014 as an Assistant Professor. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, jointly in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Department of Statistics. She works on large-scale statistical machine learning problems with a focus on statistical models, asymptotic theory, and scalable inference algorithms for large networks. Along with investigators across campus, Sarkar co-leads the NSF TRIPODS (Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science) grant to establish a new institute on the Foundations of Data Science at UT Austin. 

Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University, 2010