Alyson G. Wilson

Alyson G. Wilson
Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives, North Carolina State University

Educational Background
PhD, Statistics, Duke University
MS, Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
BA, Mathematical Sciences, Rice University

Alyson Wilson grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. As an undergraduate, she majored in applied math at Rice University. Her interest in statistics grew out of a summer internship in the clinical statistics department of Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company in Research Triangle Park, NC. This was the first time she understood how math could be applied to solve real-world problems.

Wilson earned her master’s degree in statistics at Carnegie Mellon and worked for a year at the National Institutes of Health. She completed her PhD at Duke University, where her dissertation focused on models for shapes with applications in medical imaging.

Wilson’s initial interest in statistics came from applications in medicine and clinical trials. However, after she earned her PhD, her family moved to New Mexico and she took a job with Cowboy Programming Resources (CPR), a small business that specialized in designing and analyzing operational evaluations of new air defense artillery systems for the US Army. This experience changed the course of Wilson’s career, as her work since then has focused on applying statistics to defense and national security, with an emphasis on understanding system reliability.

After working at CPR, Wilson was a technical staff member in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1999–2008, where she developed and led a portfolio of work applying statistics to assess the reliability of conventional and nuclear weapons. She was then an associate professor in the department of statistics at Iowa State University (2008–2011) and a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses Science and Technology Policy Institute and System Evaluation Division (2011–2013).

Wilson moved to North Carolina State University in 2013 and is currently a professor in the department of statistics and associate vice chancellor for national security and special research initiatives. In this role, she leads the NC State data science initiative, national laboratories initiative, and Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, which is a partnership with the National Security Agency.

Wilson is proud her work has contributed to improving the use of data and quantitative methods in defense. She is also proud of the work she has done to encourage the next generation of scientists, particularly through the National Youth Science Foundation.