Affiliation
Assistant Professor, Statistics, Wake Forest University

Education
Postdoc, Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
PhD, Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University
MS, Biostatistics, Washington University in St. Louis
BA, Religious Studies and Italian, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lucy D’Agostino McGowan is a biostatistician, teacher, science communicator, podcaster, partner, mom, programmer, Disney enthusiast, and BB-8 builder. She spent the beginning of her childhood in Boston, Massachusetts, and the rest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she lives today.

D’Agostino McGowan is an assistant professor of statistics at Wake Forest University (WFU) and balances her time between research and teaching while heading up the WFU Data Science Lab. Her research focuses on causal inference, human-data interaction, and statistical communication. She fell in love with the statistics field after doing a Summer Institute in Biostatistics at Boston University. She enjoys the biostatistics field because it “melds quantitative rigor with teamwork and is a great way to help people stay healthy and happy.”

Recently, D’Agostino McGowan teamed up with researchers from the Johns Hopkins Infectious Disease Dynamics group to develop methods to help COVID-19 contact tracing programs build strategies and evaluate their outcomes. This work began with developing a mathematical modeling framework to evaluate the expected reductions in disease transmission due to test-trace-isolate programs, along with an accompanying R package, tti. She then developed a Shiny application, ConTESSA, that allows public health officials to enter their data and use the mathematical models behind the scenes to quantify the current effects of their contact tracing programs, identify what kinds of program changes would yield the greatest reductions in COVID-19 transmission, and share their results with colleagues. Finally, this project culminated in a Coursera course in which practitioners learn how to use the application and methods. A melding of theory, application, programming, and communication, this project encapsulates the type of work D’Agostino McGowan excels in.

An avid statistical communicator, D’Agostino McGowan’s efforts in statistical communication span from op-eds about the current COVID-19 pandemic; a podcast in partnership with the American Journal of Epidemiology, Casual Inference; and outreach via social media. She is the chair of the ASA Committee on Women in Statistics and co-leads an effort with past-chair Stephanie Hicks to build community and engagement via the @WomeninStat rotating curator Twitter account. Every week, a different person takes over the account to talk about the work they do in statistics and data science. Featured curators come from a diversity of professions and have a range of experiences, from novice to expert.