Sarah (Sally) Newcomb Whitney Thurston (born April 28, 1956)[1] is an American biostatistician and environmental statistician whose research involves the application of Bayesian hierarchical modeling to problems in environmental health, including work on endocrine disruptors, the effects of mercury in fish on prenatal development, and the health effects of air pollution.
She is a professor of biostatistics and a professor of environmental science in the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
[2] Thurston majored in biology at Oberlin College, graduating in 1978.
[3] Her doctoral dissertation, Error Analysis of Food Stamp Microsimulation Models, was jointly advised by Alan M. Zaslavsky and Donald Rubin.
[1] Thurston became an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute in 2006.