She is a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University,[1] and a regular columnist for the "Points of Significance" column in Nature Methods.
[2] Altman studied mathematics at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1974, and spent two years teaching at Government Teacher's Training College in Lafia, Nigeria.
Returning to Canada, she earned a master's degree in statistics from Toronto in 1979.
[1] Her dissertation, supervised by Iain M. Johnstone, was Smoothing Data with Correlated Errors.
[1] Altman and her coauthor Julio C. Villarreal won the 2005 Canadian Journal of Statistics Award for their paper "Self-modelling regression for longitudinal data with time-invariant covariates".