Nicole Alana Lazar (born December 14, 1966, in Washington, D.C.) is a statistician who holds triple citizenship as an American, Canadian, and Israeli.^[1] She is a professor of statistics at Pennsylvania State University.^[2] Previously she was a professor at the University of Georgia, where she was interim Department Head of the statistics department from 2014 to 2016.^[2] Her research interests include empirical likelihood, functional neuroimaging, model selection and the history and sociology of statistics.^[3]

Lazar graduated magnum cum laude from Tel Aviv University in 1988. After earning a master's degree in statistics from Stanford University in 1993,^[1] she completed her Ph.D. in 1996 at the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Per Mykland.^[1][4] She joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty in 1996, and moved to Georgia in 2004.^[1] In 2015 she became editor-in-chief of The American Statistician.^[5]

She is the author of a book, The Statistical Analysis of Functional MRI Data (Springer, 2008).^[6][7][8] One of her columns, "The Arts: Digitized, Quantified, and Analyzed", was selected for the anthology The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014.^[9]

In 2014 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association "for foundational statistical contributions to the area of empirical likelihood; for the development of new statistical methods for the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data; and for developing, reforming, and enhancing statistical education."^[10] In 2021 she was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.^[11]