Dianne Cook
Monash University

Educational Background
PhD, Statistics, Rutgers University
MSc, Statistics, Rutgers University
BS/Diploma of Education, Mathematics, Statistics, and Biochemistry, University of New England

Diane Cook was born in a small town in Australia, Wauchope, which is on the mid-north coast of New South Wales (NSW). It’s close to beaches, dairy farming, and rain forests. She was always good at mathematics. Maybe it was the number plate games her mom had her play in their frequent car trips, which required fast adding of the digits to win. Or it may have been an interest in sports. Cook received a cricket bat for her 5th birthday and went on to be the first woman to play in the local men’s competition, then the first woman selected to the men’s college A grade team at university. She eventually was selected to be on the Prime Minister’s XI to play England in the 1980s at the Manuka Oval in Canberra. Her parents were supportive of the sports. For example, her dad chartered a small plane to fly from their home town to Canberra for the day to watch the match. He was learning to fly at the time, and this helped get him through his license test.

Cook was also the center half on her small high-school field hockey team that beat all the other larger high schools to become state hockey champions. Sports—watching sports and playing sports—exposed her to basic statistics for summarizing information around her. She remembers trying to talk to the ACT cricket team manager to sketch the locations of hits for each opposing team batsman so she could build a strategy for getting them all out.

Cook’s inspiration for studying statistics more deeply was professor Eve Bofinger at the University of New England. It was from her presence that Cook chose to major in statistics, rather than pure or applied mathematics, in undergraduate years. From undergraduate, she went on to teach math at a small school in western NSW, Binnaway, which lasted about six months before she landed a research assistant position at the Australian National University. The work wasn’t particularly interesting to Cook, so she spent her leisure time playing cricket and doing art classes. It was actually the opportunity to combine art and statistics with research in data visualization that brought her back to further study at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She worked with researchers Javier Cabrera of Rutgers and Debby Swayne and Andreas Buja of Bellcore’s research group. Jon Kettenring from Bellcore organized a scholarship to pay Cook’s fees. She also had substantial support from close friends Andrew McDougall—faculty at Rutgers—his mom, and famous New Zealand artist Gretchen Albrecht.

Where Cook really learned how to do data analysis was at Iowa State University, where Hadley Wickham, Heike Hofmann, and she first entered a data analysis competition. This was the first of many to come, and they have evolved into what Hadley spearheaded in the tidyverse community. Cook believes this way of thinking also makes it much easier to teach data analysis to new students.