Harvard’s Susan Murphy Wins the Van Wijngaarden Award for Using Statistics to Improve Health Care Decision Making

Susan A. Murphy, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and of Computer Science and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, was awarded this year’s Van Wijngaarden Award by the Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica.

The prize is named after former Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica director Adriaan van Wijngaarden, who was a prominent Dutch mathematician and computer scientist. He helped introduce the computer in the Netherlands. The prize is awarded every five years to a mathematician of special significance.

Professor Murphy won the honor for her work applying statistical methods to improving health care decision making. Her research focuses on developing data analysis methods and experimental designs to improve real-time multi-stage decision-making in mobile health. She led the development of a new type of sequential trial which is now deployed across many medical areas including treatment of various chronic diseases and addiction disorders.

Professor Murphy joined the Harvard faculty in 2017. From 1998 to 2017 she taught at the University of Michigan. Dr. Murphy began her academic career on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University.

Professor Murphy is a graduate of Louisiana State University, where she majored in mathematics. She holds a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of North Carolina.