Marc A. Suchard is a professor in three departments at University of California, Los Angeles; biostatistics, biomathematics, and human genetics. He is also a research investigator with the US Department of Veterans Affairs.  He earned his PhD in biomathematics from UCLA in 2002 and continued for an MD degree, which he received in 2004.  Dr Suchard is a leading Bayesian statistician who focuses on high-performance statistical computing through massive parallelization and inference of stochastic processes in genomics and for massive datasets in healthcare. His training in both medicine and applied probability helps to bridge the gap in understanding between statistical theory and clinical practicality.

He has co-authored several widely used statistical software packages in phylogenetics, including BEAGLE and BEAST. He has also written over 325 peer-reviewed publications and received numerous awards, including the 2003 Savage Award (an international prize for the best Bayesian dissertation), the 2006 and 2011 Mitchell Prizes (the premier award in applied Bayesian statistics), a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship to promote Bayesian approaches in medicine, research gifts from Microsoft Corp. and Google to further statistical computing, and the 2013 COPSS Presidents’ Award for outstanding contributions to the statistics profession by a person aged 40 or under, arguably the highest research honour across the field.  In 2021, he received the US National Institute of Statistical Sciences' Jerome Sacks Award for outstanding cross-disciplinary research and holds fellowships in the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.