Sally W. Thurston

Sarah (Sally) Newcomb Whitney Thurston, born in 1956, is an American biostatistician and environmental statistician. Her research primarily involves the application of Bayesian hierarchical modeling to various issues in environmental health. These topics include the investigation of endocrine disruptors, the impact of mercury in fish on prenatal development, and the health effects associated with air pollution. She holds the position of professor of biostatistics and professor of environmental science within the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Thurston completed her undergraduate education at Oberlin College, where she majored in biology and graduated in 1978. She subsequently earned a master's degree in natural resources from Cornell University in 1991. She then enrolled at Harvard University for doctoral studies in statistics, earning a second master's degree in 1992. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1997, with a dissertation titled "Error Analysis of Food Stamp Microsimulation Models," supervised jointly by Alan M. Zaslavsky and Donald Rubin.

Following her doctoral studies, Thurston remained at Harvard as a postdoctoral research fellow from 1997 until 2000, and then as a research associate from 2000 to 2002. In 2002, she accepted a faculty position at the University of Rochester. She also acquired an additional affiliation in oncology in 2005 and was awarded tenure in 2008.

Regarding her personal background, Thurston is the daughter of mathematician Hassler Whitney. Her mother, Mary Barnett Garfield, was a granddaughter of Harry Augustus Garfield and a great-granddaughter of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States.

In terms of professional recognition, Thurston was elected as an International Statistical Institute Member in 2006. She was also named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2019.