Wendy K. Tam is Professor and Stevenson Chair of Computer Science, Political Science, and Law at Vanderbilt University and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, an affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Professional Researcher in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Previously, she was Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with appointments in Political Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Asian American Studies, Law, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley.

Her general research interests are in the development of computational and statistical models across varied applications. Her research is driven by a desire to discover creative and important ways for societal advances to march alongside scientific and technological innovation. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, capitalizing on the strengths of many individual disciplines by recognizing and integrating them into a collective approach. Her aim is to harness the power of information by developing statistical and mathematical models to guide computing technology toward intelligent information extraction. Her scholarly publications have appeared in the fields of Political Science, Geography, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, High Performance Computing, Operations Research, Physics, Medicine, Asian American Studies, Racial and Ethnic Politics, and Law. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as computing allocation grants on the Blue Waters supercomputer, the SDSC Comet supercomputer, the TACC Stampede2 supercomputer, the PSC Bridges-2 supercomputer, and the NCSA Delta supercomputer.

Her research has won writing competitions, received best paper awards, and been recognized with the High Performance Computing Innovation Excellence Award. Her teaching has often been ranked as excellent by her students. She has also been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Society for Political Methodology, and the Hoover Institution as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

She has been a member of a number of advisory boards including the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science magazine, the Committee of Visitors for the NSF's Social, Behavior, and Economic Sciences Division, the Educational Advisory Board of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, PI4, an NSF funded program to broaden the research background and career prospects of mathematics graduate students, and President Obama's Commission on Election Administration, as well as a member of eight different NSF Review Panels spanning directorates in political science, statistics, big data, and engineering. She has served on the Executive Council of the American Political Science Association, as editor of the journal, Political Analysis, as a member of the editorial board for a dozen journals, and as a reviewer for over 145 different academic journals, agencies, foundations, or presses, spanning more than a dozen disciplines.

She has a passion for beautiful mathematics and regularly teaches mathematics to children in math circles and summer camps. When not thinking about math or research, you can find her wandering the world on foot or in pursuit of her youth on the soccer field.