She is a professor and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Washington.

[6][7] She was awarded the American Statistical Association Gertrude Mary Cox Scholarship in 2008.

[8] Her doctoral thesis, A penalized matrix decomposition, and its applications was supervised by Robert Tibshirani.

[3] Witten applies statistical machine learning to personalised medical treatments and decoding the genome.

[19] She was named to the 2022 class of Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, for "substantial contributions to the field of statistical machine learning, with applications to biology; and for communicating the fundamental ideas in the field to a broad audience".