She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida,[1] and is the former president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics.
[2] Datta did her undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Calcutta, earning a bachelor's degree there in 1986.
Having to move to the University of Georgia because of family reasons,[2] she earned a master's degree in applied statistics there in 1990 and then a Ph.D. in 1995.
[1] Her dissertation, supervised by Jonathan Arnold, was Dynamics of Cytonuclear Disequilibria and Related Statistical Tests for The Neutrality of Mitochondrial DNA markers for Hybrid Zone Data.
[1] In 2012, she became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association,[1][5] and in 2014 she was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "for her distinguished contributions to methodological and collaborative research in bioinformatics, computational biology, and biostatistics, and for student training and promoting women in STEM fields".