Affiliation: Associate Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Clinic Program Director, Harvey Mudd College

Growing up in a small Georgia town, Talithia Williams loved to spend time outside playing make-believe. She would drag her brothers out and make them act as customers in her pretend restaurant, where she would make delicious mud pies. She would take grass and twigs and acorns and put them together, and that would be her salad.  She would even put some of those red berries on top—you know, the ones that are poisonous. She knows that now.

Eventually, Williams became fascinated by ice skaters and gymnasts. She joined the drill team in middle school. She would do cartwheels and flips in her backyard across the lawn and make her brothers hold up perfect 10s for her. After she saw the ’96 Olympics, she knew she wanted to be Dominique Dawes.

In all her imagining, Williams never imagined herself as a statistician, mathematician, or scientist. She knew those people existed, but she didn’t know anybody who looked like her and did those things, so it never became something she aspired to.  
 
That began to change in her senior year of high school. Williams was enrolled in AP Calculus, where out of approximately 26 students, four were African American. Her teacher, Mr. Dorman, was an older white man who inspired her with his intellect and sense of humor. Whenever they would get stuck on a problem, he would pump them up and say, “You guys are doing all the heavy lifting with derivatives and integration! You just need a ninth grader with a calculator to work out those little details.” 

One day after class, he pulled Williams to the side and said, “Talithia, you should think about majoring in math when you go to college.” As a 17-year-old, she was shocked to hear him say that because he was so different from her, and Williams wasn’t a high-performing student in calculus. His affirmation planted a seed that would forever change her trajectory, because even though she never saw herself as a mathematician, he did.
 
Williams was accepted to Spelman College—a historically Black college for women in Atlanta, Georgia—and awarded a NASA Women in Science and Engineering scholarship. It was at Spelman that she was first exposed to African American women with PhDs in mathematics, chemistry, physics, you name it. This experience was unlike any other in her life.

At the urging of her Spelman mentors, Etta Falconer and Sylvia Bozeman, Williams entered the PhD program in mathematics at Howard University. It was there that she took her first mathematical statistics course and a biostatistics elective that eventually led her to transfer to Rice University to complete her PhD in statistics.

One of Williams’s proudest moments is being hooded by her PhD adviser, Kathy Ensor, when she earned her PhD. She had recently given birth to her and her husband’s first child and was excited to celebrate these two milestones with all of her extended family.