Affiliation
US Food and Drug Administration

Education
PhD, Applied Statistics, University of Maryland
MA, Statistics, Kansas State University

I grew up in Western North Carolina and spent my high-school years in the small town of Murphy, graduating in 1961. My parents raised me to believe both boys and girls should study what interested them, so I majored in math at Carson-Newman, a small Baptist college in Tennessee. In my senior year, I took a statistics course, and I knew then I wanted to study statistics in graduate school.

I was fortunate in that I received a psychometric fellowship in the statistics department at Kansas State University. My professors urged students to join the American Statistical Association, which I did in 1967 and have been a member ever since. Being an ASA member has opened so many doors for me, providing me with wonderful mentoring and wonderful friends. I have truly received back much more than I have given.

I earned a master’s degree and was working on a PhD at Kansas State but resigned to move to Alaska with my husband, who was a statistician in the Public Health Service. While there, I was able to go on several field trips with him and got my first taste of collecting ‘real’ data. I knew I wanted to be a biostatistician working with health data.

After earning a PhD in applied statistics from the University of Maryland in 1984 and working a short time with the Internal Revenue Service, I landed a job at the US Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) in their biostatistics group. It was a small group with about a half dozen statisticians. Having found my dream, I spent the rest of my career there, becoming team leader in 1990 and helping the team expand to two teams in 2009.

One of the challenges in the approval process for animals is finding ways to gather data when the subjects (animals) can’t verbally respond, like designing a study for infants. In 2015, I retired but had a chance to continue part-time at CVM working on antimicrobial issues and as a statistical consultant with the minor species group.

As mentioned above, being an ASA member is important to me. I found that if you ask if there is a job that needs to be done, usually there is one waiting for you. Thus, it is easy to get involved with the ASA. But in all the ASA jobs I have had, I always felt I got more back than I gave. The ASA has been and still is a vital part of my career. I felt privileged to serve a term on the ASA Board of Directors as Council of Sections representative and a term as chair of the Biopharmaceutical Section.

Along with the ASA, I am a member of the Caucus for Women in Statistics, having served as the treasurer for many years. Just as in the ASA, I have made many friends and received much welcome mentoring advice. My hope is that I continue to be a friend and mentor to many colleagues.