Chandra Erdman

Affiliation: Google
Education: PhD, Statistics, Yale University

Chandra Erdman’s world was small and unpredictable while growing up in low-income housing in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The odds of academic success were against her, but she found a sense of control in numbers. She also found confidence and a way to expand her possibilities exponentially. Math changed her life; she started college at 15 and earned her first degree in mathematics by 20.

After the fun she had calculating the odds of winning games of chance in her first probability and statistics course, she wanted more. She leaned on mentors who helped her move forward in pursuing advanced degrees. Erdman was accepted into the McNair Scholars and EDGE programs, which gave her the resources and social support to complete her PhD in statistics. Her proudest moment was passing her qualifying exam because she had seen so many smart people ahead of her fail this step. She remembers jumping up and down when she got the news, knowing she was on her way to becoming the first Black person to earn this degree at Yale.

At Yale, Erdman created Bayesian Change Point, a time series software package used to study cancer, financial markets, climate change, and more. She couldn’t have imagined the impact this would have for years to come. She says it’s gratifying to know her work is still aiding in such vast and meaningful scientific discovery.

Erdman’s first job after earning her PhD was as a research statistician for the US Census Bureau. She had the opportunity to travel to the statistical agencies of various nations, where she and her colleagues discussed methodologies for understanding economies and populations. Next, she joined a leadership-building organization as director of analytics, helping demonstrate the impact of creating diverse work spaces. During her time there, Erdman was offered and accepted a position as a senior solutions consultant on the consumer insight analytics team at Google. In that role, she led studies, designed curricula, and trained analysts in understanding user feedback to improve Google product offerings.

After a year at Google, Erdman transitioned into her current job as a technical program manager. She has been able to affect many products, starting with Gmail, Drive, and the rest of the Workspace suite. She says the most interesting aspect of working with these products was that, for the first time, she had more data than she knew how to process, which led to publishing a paper, titled “Performance Analysis of Cloud Applications,” about the challenges of data collection in products with more than a billion active accounts.

In the six years since becoming a technical program manager, Erdman has led four high-priority programs across Google. Currently, she leads a program that improves the security of more than 150 products in Google Cloud.

The pursuit of mathematics gave Erdman’s life a trajectory that was statistically improbable and opened her world in ways she never thought possible. By seeking what was universal, objective, and achievable, she found herself creating possibilities and solutions that will impact the world beyond her lifetime.