Tamara Broderick facts for kids

Tamara Ann Broderick is an American computer scientist who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She studies and works on machine learning and something called Bayesian inference.

• Machine learning is when computers learn from data without being told exactly what to do. It's like teaching a computer to recognize a cat by showing it many pictures of cats.
• Bayesian inference is a way of using math to figure out how likely something is, especially when you have new information. It helps scientists make better guesses based on what they already know and new facts.

Early Life and Education

Tamara Broderick grew up in Parma Heights, Ohio. She went to Laurel School and finished in 2003. While in high school, she joined the first-ever Women's Technology Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This program helps young women learn about technology.

She then studied mathematics at Princeton University, earning her first degree in 2007. She won a special scholarship called the Marshall Scholarship. This allowed her to continue her studies in England at the University of Cambridge.

College Achievements

While at Princeton, Tamara was a runner-up for the Alice T. Shafer Prize. This award is given for excellent work in mathematics by women. She also helped lead the Princeton Math Club. They even organized a math competition for high school teams. She won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for having the highest grades at Princeton.

During her college years, Broderick worked with scientist Rachel Mandelbaum. They studied something called dark matter haloes. These are invisible areas of matter that surround galaxies.

Graduate Studies

In 2009, Tamara earned a Master's degree from the University of Cambridge. Her Master's project looked at how to make communication more efficient.

Later in 2009, she returned to America. She joined the University of California, Berkeley for her Master's and PhD degrees. Her studies were supported by special fellowships. For her PhD, she studied how to group large amounts of data. This is called clustering. She also worked on making it faster to analyze huge amounts of data that are constantly coming in.

Research and Teaching

In 2015, Tamara Broderick became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is very interested in Bayesian statistics and Graphical models. Graphical models are like maps that show how different pieces of information are connected.

She has received several important awards and grants for her research. These include a Google Faculty Research Grant and an award from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. She also received an award from the United States Army Research Laboratory. This award helps her research how to use machine learning to understand how certain we can be about data analysis. She is also an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation scholar.

Helping Others Learn

Tamara Broderick often shares her knowledge with others.

• In 2018, she spoke at a conference for women in data science at Harvard University.
• She also talked about Bayesian inference at a big conference on machine learning.
• She led a three-day workshop at University College London in June 2018. This workshop taught people about machine learning.

Broderick is an advisor for two groups: AI.Reverie and WiML (Women in Machine Learning). She has also helped create an introduction to machine learning for high school students. This was part of the Women's Technology Program (WTP) at MIT. She also shares software she has created on her website for others to use.

Awards and Recognitions

Tamara Broderick has received many awards for her important work.

• She won the Evelyn Fix Memorial Medal and the Savage Award for her PhD research.
• She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. This award helps her make her machine learning methods work even better with very large amounts of data.
• In 2021, she was a winner of the Leadership Academy from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies.