Douglas Nychka is a statistician and data scientist whose areas of research include the theory, computation and application of curve and surface fitting with a focus on geophysical and environmental applications. Currently he is a Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the Colorado School of Mines and Senior Scientist Emeritus at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Boulder, Colorado. Before moving to Mines he directed the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences at NCAR. His current focus in research is the computation of spatial statistics methods for large data sets and the migration of these algorithms into easy to use R packages.
He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics and a recipient of the Jerry Sacks Award for interdisciplinary research.