Purnamrita Sarkar

Purnamrita Sarkar serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, where she has held faculty positions since 2014 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and Statistics.

Her research specializes in large-scale statistical machine learning, with core contributions to:

• Statistical modeling for complex network structures
• Asymptotic theory development for high-dimensional data
• Scalable inference algorithms for massive network datasets

Professor Sarkar co-leads the NSF TRIPODS grant establishing UT Austin's Foundations of Data Science institute, driving transdisciplinary collaboration across campus. This initiative represents significant research infrastructure development in theoretical data science principles.

Her work maintains strong industry relevance through algorithmic innovations for real-world network analysis while advancing fundamental statistical theory. Current research directions focus on extending methodological frameworks to emerging data modalities and improving computational efficiency for next-generation network datasets.