Home » A Statistician's Life, Celebrating Women in Statistics

Michelle C. Dunn

1 March 2018 3,278 views No Comment

Affiliation
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Data Collaboratory

Educational Background
Carnegie Mellon University: PhD, Statistics (2005)
Carnegie Mellon University: MS, Statistics (1996)
Harvard University: AB, Applied Math (1995)

About Michelle
Michelle Dunn is CTO and co-founder of Data Collaboratory, a technology company that builds data science tools. Data Collaboratory’s flagship product is GRANTED!, a tool that uses data science to guide researchers to the most appropriate funding opportunities. GRANTED! builds on Michelle’s years of experience in federal funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

She started working at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the NIH, in 2009 as a program director who advocated for the funding of grants to develop statistical methodology. In this position, she advised applicants from across the country about appropriate funding opportunity announcements. GRANTED! automates this function by scraping FOAs from publicly available sources and using text-mining techniques to match them with a researcher’s interests.

Next to building a data science company from the ground up, Michelle is proudest of her contributions to developing and leading the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative. She was instrumental in conceiving and implementing a collection of programs aimed at nurturing a biomedical workforce capable of analyzing data and developing new methods for analyzing data. The BD2K Initiative provided funding for statisticians, informaticians, and other biomedical scientists to do research and receive training in data science.

Michelle grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and enjoyed math from an early age. She first learned about statistics on the drive from Memphis to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the start of classes at Harvard. All freshman had to take a quantitative reasoning test based on a booklet containing essentially a “Stat 101” course. After reading that booklet, Michelle realized why math is important. At Harvard, she was fortunate to find professors and graduate students who encouraged her to pursue her studies in statistics. From Harvard, she went to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for a master’s, worked in government for a while, and then returned to CMU for a PhD.

Michelle’s thesis adviser, Jay Kadane, was supportive not only of her choice of dissertation topic, but also of her choice to be a stay-at-home mom following the completion of her dissertation. This choice could have ended her statistical career had it not been for an open-minded statistician and hiring manager at NCI, Brenda Edwards. Brenda strove to create family-friendly working conditions because she had witnessed the hardships women and working mothers had endured during her career.

Brenda is Michelle’s hero; she is a statistician who is dedicated to making the world a better place, not just through her work measuring the burden of cancer, but through her leadership of people and projects. Leadership requires taking calculated risks, making sometimes unpopular decisions, and communicating a vision and road map for concerted action. Michelle’s goal is to continue to put into action what she has learned about leadership from Brenda.

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