Rebecca Willett

Rebecca Willett is the Worah Family Professor of Statistics and Computer Science in the Wallman Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. She is the Director of AI at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, and she holds a courtesy appointment at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). Her research is focused on machine learning foundations, scientific machine learning, and signal processing. Willett received the inaugural Data Science Career Prize from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2024, was named a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021, and was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2022. She is the Deputy Director for Research at the NSF-Simons Foundation National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, Deputy Director for Research at the NSF-Simons Institute for AI in the Sky (SkAI), and a member of the NSF Institute for the Foundations of Data Science Executive Committee. She is the Faculty Director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. She helps direct the Air Force Research Lab University Center of Excellence on Machine Learning. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007, was a DARPA Computer Science Study Group member, and received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010.