Comment by sabraham

Ah, so I used a 2-degree heuristic to come to that conclusion--I haven't had any first hand experience with her, nor do I have contact with her former students. A few stats professors independently recommended her to me as a supervisor, her students seem to do well, and her research page is more welcoming than most (versus, say Ullman's page: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/ or say, read Brian Ripley's posts on the R mailing list). The one thing I'd add: my experience has been that academics generally have less empathy than others; I'd be interested to hear from old students how she compares to other faculty.