Photo by Barbi Barnum from
Studio B Photography

Affiliation
Director, Mathematical Statistics Research Center, Office of Survey Methods Research, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Educational Background
Joint Program in Survey Methodology Certificate in Survey Statistics (2015)
George Mason University: PhD, Computational Sciences and Informatics (Computational Statistics area) (1995)
The George Washington University: MS, NASA Langley Research Center, Aerospace Engineering (1991)
Cameron University: BS, Physics and Mathematics (1989)

About Wendy
Wendy Martinez was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. After high school, she served as an active-duty member of the US Army Signal Corps, where she had the opportunity to be stationed in Germany for several years.

Martinez has been serving as the director of the Mathematical Statistics Research Center at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for six years. Prior to this, she worked in several research positions throughout the Department of Defense. She held the position of science and technology program officer at the Office of Naval Research, where she established a research portfolio comprised of academia and industry performers developing data science products for the future Navy and Marine Corps.

Her areas of interest include computational statistics, exploratory data analysis, and text data mining. She is the lead author of three books on MATLAB and statistics. These books cover topics ranging from classical approaches in statistics to computationally intensive methods and exploratory data analysis. She became interested in data science when pursuing her PhD under Edward Wegman (GMU), who had founded a new curriculum in computational statistics that included most of the courses in what is now considered data science.

Martinez was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2006 and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She was recently honored by the American Statistical Association when she received the ASA Founders Award at the 2017 Joint Statistical Meetings.