Sara van de Geer

Sara Anna van de Geer (born 7 May 1958 in Leiden) is a Dutch mathematical statistician who is a professor in the department of mathematics at ETH Zurich. Her main research areas include empirical process theory, statistical learning theory, and nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics. She is the daughter of psychologist John P. van de Geer.

Education She earned a Master's degree in Mathematics in 1982 and Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1987, both from the University of Leiden.

Career Van de Geer was a Scientific Researcher at the University of Tillburg from 1982–1983, followed by two stints as a Scientific Researcher at the Centre for Mathematics and Computational Science in Amsterdam from 1983–1987 and 1988–1989. There, Van de Geer was the first female professor at the Department of Mathematics.

Research Van de Geer's research is centered around formulating unifying principles for statistical theory and modelling, while identifying theoretical foundations behind existing methods. and received the Van Wijngaarden Award in 2016. She is a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the International Statistical Institute, a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau, and a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She was president of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability for the term 2015–2017. In 2018 she was appointed as a member of the Scientific Committee of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach. In 2022 she was elected as an international member to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

In April 2011, she was a plenary speaker at the 47th Dutch Mathematical Congress in Twente, and a few months later in August 2011 she was a plenary speaker at the ISI satellite meeting "Dynamic Statistical Models" in Copenhagen.