Welcome!
I am a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University, privileged to be working with Dr. Jason Xu and Dr. Alexander A. Fisher. Currently, my research lies at the intersection of epidemiology and phylodynamic inference. Stochastic epidemic models evolve in continuous time, while available data are typically reported in aggregated daily or weekly counts. Part of my work involves developing computationally efficient and flexible approaches to address this fundamental missing-data challenge. In addition, I am exploring how incorporating sequence data alongside case-count data can improve inference of key epidemic parameters and provide a more comprehensive understanding of disease dynamics.
I grew up in Kolkata, India, completed my undergraduate degree at St. Xavier’s College, and earned my master’s degree from IIT Kanpur. During my Master’s studies, I was fortunate to work with Dr. Dootika Vats, an experience that profoundly shaped my research interests and perspective. Under her mentorship, I explored theoretical and computational questions in Markov chain Monte Carlo, including estimating the spectral gap of the Polya–Gamma sampler and developing importance sampling estimators for the Metropolis-within-Gibbs chain.
Publications
Preprints
- Marginal Likelihood Inference for Fitting Dynamical Survival Analysis Models to Epidemic Count Data
Suchismita Roy, Alexander A. Fisher, Jason Xu
arXiv, R package
Education
- Ph.D. in Statistics, 2022 - 2027 (Expected)
Duke University, United States - Master’s in Statistics, 2020 - 2022
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India - B.Sc. in Statistics, 2017 - 2020
St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous college under Calcutta University), India
Teaching Assistant Experience
- STA 210: Regresssion Analysis, Spring 2023
Instructor: Yue Jiang - STA 211: The Mathematics of Regression, Fall 2023
Instructor: Miheer Dewaskar - STA 532: Theory of Statistical Inference, Spring 2024
Instructor: Surya Tokdar - STA 310: Generalized Linear Model, Spring 2025
Instructor: Rebecca Steorts - STA 198CNL: Introduction to Global Health Data Science, Fall 2025
Instructor: Yue Jiang - STA 332: Statistical Inference (Head TA), Spring 2026
Instructor: Sifan Liu
Conferences and Workshops
- Computational and Methodological Statistics 2025, Dec 13-15, 2025
- BIRS-CMO workshop - Mathematical and Statistical Challenges in Post-Pandemic Epidemiology and Public Health, Jun 15-20, 2025
- International Indian Statistical Association 2025, Dec 27-31, 2024
- Computational Genomics Summer Institute (CGSI) 2024, Jul 15-19, 2024
- useR! 2021-The R Conference, Jul 5-9, 2021