I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Prior to that, I completed a postdoc with Professor Tamara Broderick at MIT and earned my Ph.D. in Statistics at Wharton where I was supervised by Professors Ed George and Veronika Rockova. My research interests include Bayesian hierarchical modeling, Bayesian regression trees, model selection, causal inference, and applications in public health and sports.

My CV is available here.

Recent Papers

1. Kokandakar, A.H., Lin, Y., Jin, S., Weiss, J., Rabinowitz, A.R., May, R.A.B., Small, D.S., and Deshpande, S.K. (2024). "Adolescent sports participation and health in early adulthood: An observational study." Youth & Society
   [preprint] [more info]
2. Deshpande, S.K. (2024). "flexBART: Flexible Bayesian regression trees with categorical predictors." Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics
   [paper] [preprint] [more info]
3. Nguyen, P-H.V., Yee, R., Deshpande, S.K. (2024+). "Oblique Bayesian additive regression trees."
   [preprint] [more info]
4. Yee, R., Ghosh, S., and Deshpande, S.K. (2024+). "Scalable piecewise smoothing with BART."
   [preprint] [more info]
5. Deshpande, S.K., Bai, R., Balocchi, C., Starling, J.E., and Weiss, J. (2024+). "VCBART: Bayesian trees for varying coefficients." Bayesian Analysis
   [paper] [preprint] [more info]

Working with me

If you are currently enrolled in, or accepted to, a UW–Madison graduate program (i.e. an MS, MA, or Ph.D. program), please feel free to email me about potential research opportunities. As the majority of my reserach involves Bayesian statistics, I strongly advise students to take STAT 775 with me before joining the group.

If you are not a current or incoming UW–Madison graduate student but are interested in working together, please submit an application to one of our graduate programs; more info at this link. Of course, if you are interested in working with me, please do mention that in your application. That said, I am not involved in the admissions process nor can I comment or provide feedback on your application. Unfortunately, I am not able to reply to all inquiries from students who are at other universities or are in the process of applying to UW–Madison graduate programs. Additionally, I do not offer internships, visiting scholar positions, or summer research positions, regardless of funding.

More about me

Before Wharton, I studied mathematics at MIT and spent a year at Jesus College, Cambridge as part of the (now sadly defunct) Cambridge-MIT Exchange. When I’m not thinking about statistics, I enjoy cooking, making cocktails, photography, and watching sports (esp. Dallas teams!).