Duke Sayan Mukherjee’s statistical science professor dies unexpectedly at 54

Sayan Mukherjee, research professor of statistical sciences and mathematics and professor of biostatis and bioinformatics, died unexpectedly on Monday at 54 in Leipzig, Germany.

“Sayan was a brilliant scientist who cared deeply about science, our human condition and our individual. He was a devoted mentor who was regularly going beyond, ” said Jonathan Mattingly, Kimberly J. Jenkins professor of new technologies of the university and professor of statistical sciences and mathematics. “… we will miss it deep.”

Mukherjee joined Duke as a teacher in 2004, where he worked on the development of new statistical and computer tools to analyze complex and large -dimensional data in the fields, including mathematics, IT, biology and medicine. It was particularly interested in understanding data with unusual or complex structures, including forms and surfaces.

In 2022, Mukherjee moving At the University of Leipzig in Germany, where he worked as professor Alexander von Humboldt for artificial intelligence while retaining his affiliation with Duke. In the role, he was also a member of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, investigating new approaches to the use of biological data to improve precision medicine.

During his stay in Germany, Mukherjee “achieved exceptional things” and “considerably improved the research profile of () Institute”, ” said László Székelyhidi, Managing Director of Max Planck Institute.

In Duke, Mukherjee is known by Hongkai Zhao, Ruth F. Devarney, distinguished professor of mathematics and president of the department of mathematics, as an “exceptional scholar” which was “an important link between mathematics and statistics”.

Those who knew Mukherjee spoke of his kindness, his warmth and his sense of humor, recalling how he supported his colleagues during difficult moments and liked to share his knowledge of “almost everything”, from statistics to history to music.

Mukherjee was born in Kolkata, India, and spent part of her childhood in France and Canada before moving to the United States. He obtained his undergraduate diploma in electrical engineering at Princeton University in 1992, his master’s degree in applied physics and mathematics at Columbia University in 1996 and his doctorate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. In 2018, he became a member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.