Affiliation
Professor of Statistical Science and Global Health, Duke University

Educational Background
University of Mississippi: BS, Mathematics; BA, English
Harvard University: ScD, Biostatistics

About Amy
I grew up in central Mississippi and cannot remember a time I was not asking a lot of questions about how things worked, from using my dad’s soil pH test kit to being curious about how to make “scratch” since food was better when people cooked from it. I graduated from a very small public secondary school with a fabulous mathematics teacher, Freeman Hollingsworth, and I was fortunate to benefit from his excitement about mathematics and his great instruction in 8th–12th grades.

At the same time, our basketball coach and a team manager recruited me to help out with the girls’ basketball team, and I loved keeping track of team statistics for each game. (The job of team statistician also included (1) wearing all the jewelry of the players during competition—after a few games of trying to use a calculator wearing 3–4 class rings per hand, you get pretty good at converting improper fractions to decimals in your head—and (2) washing the team uniforms.)

In college, I double majored in English and mathematics (and, in fact, am fortunate today to live only two miles from a member of our Matheketeers study/survival group whose double major in physics and math was even more insane than mine). With our study group, I learned that working in teams could be fun (not just painful!).

I was fortunate to have a summer internship in the Mississippi field office of the National buy ativan us Agricultural Statistics Service, or NASS. Working in the NASS field office was my first real exposure to applied statistics, and I was hooked! That summer, I learned an amazing amount about sampling frames and study design, measurement error and digit preference (thanks to a long, hot day of field enumeration on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in mid July), and nonignorable nonresponse—topics to which I would eventually return to as part of my research.

After that summer, I was off to Boston for a great experience at Harvard, where I was fortunate to work with incredibly supportive and brilliant faculty members, including my adviser, Joe Ibrahim, and role model, Louise Ryan, who generously supported me during my early years on her NIEHS training grant.

In my academic career, I love solving challenging data analysis problems and conducting research motivated by complex questions that arise in population and health science. I love working in interdisciplinary research teams and learned the ropes from my brilliant (and patient!) colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill.

One strong focus has been involving students in research and helping them learn to use their statistical skills in team science. I’m fortunate to be in an environment where asking questions and constantly learning are part of every day, and working with students keeps me on my toes and ensures the learning never stops! I love to bring research topics (both methodological and application oriented) into the classroom and am always on the lookout for scholars to recruit to our field.