David Morganstein

Christine Fox

I am very pleased that Christine Fox has accepted our invitation to deliver the President’s Invited Address in Seattle. Christine is the assistant director of policy and analysis at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL).

Early in her career, Christine developed tactics for the defense of aircraft carriers. She was president of the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) for four years. Her other responsibilities included serving as director of the Office for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel named her as acting U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense. In this role, Christine was the highest-ranking woman ever to work in the Pentagon.

She is widely known for her experience in program management and evaluation, systems engineering, and strategic leadership. She has great interest and experience in professional mentoring, one of this year’s ASA presidential initiatives. Christine studied applied mathematics at George Mason University. In short, she is an excellent person to review ways we can use statistics to address the theme for JSM 2015: Making Better Decisions.

Christine’s talk is titled “The Role of Analysis in Supporting Strategic Decisions.” It will draw from her extensive experience working at CNA, the Department of Defense, and JHUAPL. Among the keys to being successful in supporting strategic decision-making, she will mention being timely, relevant, and able to communicate clearly. I join Christine in identifying clear communication as an important skill and have spoken about it as vital to being successful in our profession.

I understand you have an interest in professional mentoring. As you may know, that is a presidential initiative within the ASA. What can you tell us about your experiences mentoring or being mentored?
I have been extremely lucky to have many wonderful mentors in my career. All of them have been successful people, and all of them have been very generous to take their time to teach, connect, and advise me. In my experience, the best mentoring relationships form naturally. I have never found a person I admired unwilling to serve as a mentor, but I have never asked them, “Will you be my mentor?” Rather, I have just asked them questions and took every opportunity to observe them. They, in turn, noticed and took more time to explain and reach back to me. I hope I have done some of that myself for others as I have grown in my own career. I would like to add a point on gender here. All of my treasured mentors have been men, and I believe I have been a mentor to both men and women. I think gender is less important in a mentoring relationship than people may think.

What advice would you offer a statistician early in their career that might help them in their professional development or in expanding their professional network?
I think we all do our best work when we are engaged in problems we find interesting and rewarding and we are in an environment that brings out the best in us. It is too easy to continue doing work that is okay. I think it is critically important to find work that you love. The people you work with, your current and future network, are vital components of a rewarding work environment. Don’t settle; strive to find the best fit for you.

What do you think the ASA can do to increase the visibility of our profession?
I think associations like the ASA are vital to creating spaces in which people can connect to find new opportunities, share common challenges, and serve as support and encouragement. The most important challenge we face these days is the challenge of how to encourage young people to pursue a career in mathematics and science. We also need greater diversity in these fields. Associations like the ASA are key to bringing focus to these issues and creating new opportunities. I think the ASA has been serving these roles for many years and is constantly striving to do more.

What do you think are the most exciting opportunities for mathematicians and statisticians in the next few years? How can we best prepare ourselves for those opportunities?
This is a very, very exciting time to be a mathematician and, particularly, a statistician. The last several years have brought huge breakthroughs in our ability to generate and gather data. We’re all dumping huge amounts of data into clouds, whether they are personal data or professional. More recently, we are inventing autonomous vehicles that can go deep into the ocean or space, generating incredible amounts of new scientific data that we have never had before. And there are the growing opportunities to use data in tailoring medical treatments to combat any number of diseases. My colleagues at Johns Hopkins call it “precision medicine.” What are we going to do with all of this data, and who is going to figure that out? Statisticians, of course. We need creative statisticians now more than ever. I’m convinced that new statistical methods that can unlock the vast amount of knowledge buried in these enormous quantities of new data will define our future.

This is Statistics

At JSM 2014 in Boston, the ASA announced a public awareness campaign—This is Statistics—aimed at high-school juniors and seniors and college undergraduates, as well as their parents, instructors, and counselors. The goal is to interest students in statistics as their future career. The following is a brief update on the impact of the campaign, measured by a few metrics used by our public relations firm, Stanton Communications.

Stanton assesses media hits and tracks articles quoting the ASA in various outlets, such as the following:

• A Washington Post article about women in statistics
• A Fortune article about the growth of the statistics profession, especially when compared to other STEM fields
• A Chicago Sun Times article about women in the data analytics work force, pointing out that data mining is a rapidly expanding field,
• A USA Today College article, “Statistics Might Be the Most Important Class You Take in College,”

Stanton also measures social media impact. It found the campaign’s Facebook page is receiving some 2,600 hits a month, the Twitter account has more than 1,600 followers, and the video titled “Why You Need to Study Statistics” topped 10,000 views in only six weeks. While these are the usual measures for an ad campaign, it seemed to me other input might be useful.

I thought it might be interesting to ask a few high-school AP Statistics students how they reacted to our This is Statistics website and whether they were even aware of it. I was thinking about how to locate some when I read a post on the ASA Community from Rachel Braun. She said she was an AP Statistics teacher at the Edmund Burke School trying to find statisticians in the DC area that her students might shadow or who would know about internship opportunities for them. After contacting Rachel, I learned she was planning a class field trip to the Washington Statistical Society and Westat-sponsored Annual Morris Hansen Lecture! I was both surprised and delighted to learn of her interest in doing this. This was a teacher after my own heart. After announcing other distinguished attendees at the lecture, we arranged for the emcee to also introduce Rachel and her talented students.

Rachel is especially interested in helping students understand that the practice of statistics is its own kind of storytelling and that the nation collects data it needs to tell its story.  When the AP Statistics curriculum teaches descriptive data analysis, Rachel has her students choose a national data set (e.g., teen pregnancy, housing starts per capita, literacy rates, disease incidence) and create a poster using the techniques she’s taught them (e.g., boxplots, stemplots, summary statistics). She gives them this project so they will have some exposure to the broad range of available federal data resources. Six of their posters were honored in the ASA spring poster competition.

Subsequently, I asked Rachel if she or some of her students would be willing to attend an ASA Board meeting, joining us for lunch to get acquainted. She was unavailable, but one of her students, Cole Miller—an intelligent young man—did attend. We learned about his interests in math and statistics, and we asked him how we might best connect with other young men and women his age. His responses are included below, along with feedback Rachel gathered from many of her students. Their thoughtful and detailed responses were sent to ASA Public Relations Coordinator Jeff Myers, who is forwarding them to Stanton Communications. Among their reactions, I found useful ideas to consider incorporating into the website.

The comments from Rachel’s 14 students were positive, and the students offered a number of suggestions. Their messages were mostly consistent. At the same time, not surprisingly, there were different reactions to certain messages, particularly the effect of messages suggesting statistics could be a lucrative profession. While some thought this added to the attraction, others suggested it was not as important as the messages about contributing to society.

Positive reactions:

“The website really highlighted the importance of statistics, and even made it seem like it was the most important class to take. … Erdman’s video was intriguing because of her enthusiasm and her application of statistics to the real world.”

“I am immediately aware of the financial security that comes with a job in statistics. However, what caught my attention was the section labeled Make a Difference.”

“While the idea of profit is always appealing, I am more captivated by the ways in which a statistician benefits his or her community.”

“People want to know they are doing something meaningful, so my advice is to highlight the ways in which statistics is necessary as well as a rewarding path to follow.”

“The Roger Peng video was great!”

“… [T]he option of working anywhere in the world instead of having to stay in one particular place where the job is a niche market certainly sparks interest in the subject.”

“Genevera also talked about how statistics is very different from every other math course. … I will definitely look into taking more stat courses in college.”

Suggested changes:

“Provide more specific information about jobs and career opportunities.”

“The beginning phrase, ‘the coolest job you’ve never heard of,’ is not the way to inspire students to pursue statistics.”

“I didn’t like their ‘statistics isn’t as bad as you think’ approach, because it planted the idea in my head that statistics was a bad career choice.”

“It would be good if they added links to more content that gives a taste of what studying stats is like.”

Talented and creative AP Statistics teachers like Rachel Braun, with a passion for statistics, are key to encouraging high-school students to consider our profession. The ASA has a number of programs that support these teachers, providing training and connections with members of our community. One such program is Meeting Within a Meeting, a statistics workshop for K–12 teachers held during JSM. Receiving feedback from more teachers and their students is one way to sharpen our This is Statistics message and increase the impact of the campaign.

One of President-elect Jessica Utts’ initiatives for 2016 directly targets this issue. In 2014, she became the chief reader for the AP Statistics program. She proposes to “develop methods for ensuring that information and resources about careers in statistics are made widely available in high schools, especially for AP Statistics students and teachers. Provide easy access so teachers and others can effectively deliver this career information to high-school students. Provide feedback regarding ongoing career information efforts…”

The ASA’s This is Statistics campaign is off to a strong start. Look for more to come!