Rebecca Nugent is the Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science, the Associate Department Head and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Carnegie Mellon Statistics & Data Science Department, and an affiliated faculty member of the Block Center for Technology and Society. She received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington in 2006.

Prior to that, she received her B.A. in Mathematics, Statistics, and Spanish from Rice University and her M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University. She was won several national and university teaching awards including the American Statistical Association Waller Award for Innovation in Statistics Education and serves as one of the co-editors of the Springer Texts in Statistics.
She recently served on the National Academy of Sciences study on Envisioning the Data Science Discipline: The Undergraduate Perspective and is the co-chair of the current NAS study Improving Defense Acquisition Workforce Capability in Data Use.
She is the Founding Director of the Statistics & Data Science Corporate Capstone program, an experiential learning initiative that matches groups of faculty and students with data science problems in industry, non-profits, and government organizations.
She has worked extensively in clustering and classification methodology with an emphasis on high-dimensional, big data problems and record linkage applications.

Her current research focus is the development and deployment of low-barrier data analysis platforms that allow for adaptive instruction and the study of data science as a science.