Affiliation: Chief Executive Officer, Miles Development Industries Corporation

From musician to statistician is the best way to describe D. Anthony Miles’s journey. He grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and comes from a family of college graduates and famous athletes. Most notably, his grandfather was John ‘Mule’ Miles, who played professional baseball with the Negro Baseball League, and his father, Winston Miles, was drafted by the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers by the National Basketball Association.

During college, Miles played in a rock-and-roll/heavy metal band. His band tried to get a record deal. That did not happen. Life happened. However, as an accomplished musician, he went on to record eight albums of original avant-garde jazz.

Miles graduated with a degree in marketing from The University of Texas at San Antonio and went into the banking and consumer financial services industries. It was while working as a marketing analyst at Wells Fargo Bank that Miles discovered his interest in statistics, and his fascination grew during his doctoral program at the University of the Incarnate Word.

However, it was his uncle—the late Ralph E. Miles, a biostatistician—who encouraged Miles’s passion for the profession. “It was my uncle who nurtured my love of the practice of statistics, and I credit all my accomplishments to him,” said Miles.

Since leaving the banking industry, Miles has accomplished much, including a fellowship for his doctoral research with the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Doctoral Consortium. He was selected as one of 17 distinguished doctoral researchers nationwide in the entrepreneurship field.

Miles became a 21-time winner of the Academy of Business Research Conference Award for Best Paper in Marketing and Economics in 2021. Currently, he leads a nine-person research team as the principal statistician. He has presented his statistics research at conferences around the country and appeared on several major news networks and programs and in major publications as a subject matter expert, namely ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, CNN, Huffington Post, Forbes, Reader’s Digest, and Bloomberg Radio. His proudest moment is being inducted into the 2022 Marquis Who’s Who with his uncle.

Miles co-authored the upcoming book Dissertation Research Methods in the Social Sciences and will appear in two documentaries to be streamed on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. He also has three television shows in the works. One of his television shows, Angel’s Door, has been picked up by three major networks.