Abhijit Dasgupta

AstraZeneca

Data Science Associate Director

Abhijit Dasgupta is an Adjunct Professor in the Data Science and Analytics program at Georgetown University. His interests lie in the confluence of statistics and machine learning, using tools from both to develop methods and solve problems in genomics, translational science, observational studies and clinical studies, primarily in lung cancer, in a statistically rigorous manner. He acknowledges that statisticians don’t appreciate prediction, and computer scientists don’t appreciate variability, and tries doing better at both. He received foundational training in statistics and biostatistics from the Indian Statistical Institute and the highly-ranked University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a doctorate in quite a theoretical and mathematical area of biostatistics. Wanting to be more applied in his focus, Abhijit joined the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD, where he learned statistical genetics, genetic epidemiology, and bioinformatics as applied to cancer research. He continued working in oncology research for a few more years at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He spent the next decade supporting rheumatology research at the NIH, learning meta-analyses, machine learning, and Bayesian methods. He returned to his oncology roots as a Data Science Associate Director at AstraZeneca in Gaithersburg, MD, where he supports various aspects of molecular, translational, and clinical research as a member of the Oncology Data Science function. He uses R and Python every day for his work and finds excitement in deriving stories from data through data scientific analyses, visualization, and domain understanding. During the last decade, he co-founded the Statistical Programming DC meetup with Marck Vaisman, served on the board of Data Community DC, and continued evangelism of R and Python as the languages of data science. At Georgetown, he teaches Data Visualization, and Big Data & Cloud Computing. He has developed high-quality training in R and Python for various commercial, government, and educational entities. His passion outside of data science is aikido, which he has practiced for almost 30 years, holding a 4th-degree black belt.