UCLA Fielding School of Public Health’s Soumyakanti Pan receives Outstanding Student Award

A recent UCLA Fielding School of Public Health graduate has been recognized for academic excellence, service, and leadership at the school, ranked among the top public health graduate schools in the United States.

Dr. Soumyakanti Pan received the Dean's Outstanding Student Award at UCLA Fielding’s 2026 Student Academic Honors and Awards event. The award goes to one graduate student in each of the school’s five academic departments, nominated by the faculty, who has demonstrated exemplary scholastic achievement, community service, and leadership in their class.

Pan, a biostatistician working at the intersection of statistical methodology and public health, has focused his doctoral research on developing modern statistical methods that help researchers draw meaningful insights from large and complex datasets.

“The emphasis of my work is not only to place analysis in a sound statistical framework, but also to ensure that the inference and data analysis produced by these methods are understood and adopted by practitioners so that they know when resorting to them will likely be rewarded with significantly improved and enhanced data analysis,” said Pan, who received undergraduate and master’s degrees in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India, in 2019 and 2021, respectively. “This has real world impact in terms of understanding why young lives are lost where the underlying cause of death would have otherwise gone unrecorded due to resource constraints, equipping public health agencies with the evidence needed to design targeted interventions.”

His dissertation - Bayesian Modeling and Inference for Complex Dependent Non-Gaussian Data – was published in 2025. Pan received his doctoral degree from UCLA in 2025 and currently is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington and a data science fellow at the eScience Institute.

"Over the last decade or so, the scientific community has witnessed an explosion of interest in the modeling and analysis of massive databases, largely attributable to rapid developments in technology and greater access to machine learning and artificial intelligence tools,” Pan said. “These advances have, in turn, made data-rich environments increasingly accessible to researchers and policymakers – but also pose new challenges because existing methods simply can’t cope with this ‘data deluge’. My work helps solve those problems: building tools that are interpretable enough for practitioners to trust and act on, quantifying uncertainty in automated decisions, and modeling health outcomes across space and time.”

Pan's methodological contributions have found applications across several disciplines, including epidemiology, global health surveillance, environmental health, and industrial hygiene.

Along with his academic achievement at UCLA, Pan has served as a teaching assistant, and his work has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the University of Washington, and UCLA, including UCLA’s Dissertation Year Award in 2024; UCLA’s Summer Mentored Research Fellowship in 2022; and a UCLA Graduate Division University Fellowship in 2021.

“Pan is in the top echelon of Ph.D students I have had the pleasure of supervising over my past 25 years in academic research,” said Dr. Sudipto Banerjee, professor in the UCLA Fielding School’s Department of Biostatistics. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that an exciting future in academia awaits him.”