Biography and career
She grew up in rural Louisiana, and is "a serious hockey player."[1]
She graduated from Louisiana State University with a B.S. and from the University of North Carolina with a Ph.D.[2]
Dr. Murphy was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Statistics at Pennsylvania State University from fall 1989 to fall 1997.[3] She was an Associate and full Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan from spring 1998 to summer 2017. She is a Professor of Statistics at Harvard University as of fall 2017. She is also a principal investigator at The Methodology Center, at Penn State.[4]
She is developing "new methodologies to evaluate courses of treatment for individuals coping with chronic or relapsing disorders ... Murphy’s Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) is a means for learning how best to dynamically adapt treatment to each individual’s response over time. Using SMART, clinicians assess and modify patients’ treatments during the trial, an approach with potential applications in the treatment of a range of chronic diseases—such as ADHD, alcoholism, drug addiction, HIV/AIDS, and cardiovascular disease—that involve therapies that are regularly reconsidered and replaced as the disease progresses.[2]
She is the Professor of Statistics at Harvard University. She is also a Professor Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
