Retired
“I grew up living ‘variability,’” said Katherine Monti, who, born in Chicago, was living in the DC area five months later. She attended grades K–5 while living in Clarence, New York; Brewster, Massachusetts; and Maplewood, New Jersey, before moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for grades 6–12. In some ways, ‘home’ was her grandparents’ summer cottage in Southwest Harbor, Maine, where she spent part of most summers for the first 26 years of her life.
Monti always liked and did well in math. Then, in the summers before and after her first year in college, she worked for The University of North Carolina Department of Biostatistics. Her jobs included writing a manual for the graduate students on how to use the newly acquired teletype machine, ‘translating’ Fortran II programs into Fortran IV for that machine, and validating an innovative-at-the-time program being written to analyze two-way tables. Her supervisor, James Grizzle, suggested she finish her math degree at Oberlin and go to UNC for her PhD. She protested. “I’m not going on in biostatistics,” she said. “And if I do, it won’t be at UNC. … Famous last words.”
Her senior year at Oberlin, Monti took the two-semester probability/mathematical statistics sequence and considered what to do after graduation. The employment market for a PhD in pure math was grim compared to one in applied statistics. Applied statistics had another appeal to Monti: While she loved math, she also loved her broad undergraduate education. “Getting to do math while getting paid to learn in other areas? What a great gig,” she thought. She applied to and was accepted into three programs. She chose the UNC biostatistics program as the one best suited to her goals.
Monti has several achievements of which she is particularly proud from her career, which spanned teaching (University of Missouri-St Louis), industry (Ralston Purina), devices (Ciba Corning Diagnostics), and pharmaceuticals (Astra Pharmaceuticals and Rho). First, she wrote and distributed an enormously popular in-house ‘newsletter’ when working at Ralston and later Ciba Corning. In each issue, she explained a basic statistics topic using examples relevant to the audience. She would then expand on that topic in her humorous “Dear Number Cruncher” column in which “Number Cruncher” answered a letter that was purportedly submitted by an exasperated statistics user. “I taught a lot of statistics that way,” Monti said.
“Another ‘achievement’ was my, ahem, persistence,” she said. When Monti was wrangling with assumptions or data or analyses or conclusions that seemed ‘off’ despite what the subject-matter experts were telling her, her persistence often paid off, as it did on several occasions during her 20+ years in pharma when, to the astonishment of colleagues, she successfully challenged medical directors who were disinclined to be questioned.
Finally, Monti is proud of her contributions via leadership roles for various ASA entities: the Boston Chapter; Biopharmaceutical Section; Advisory Committee to Continuing Education; Fellows Committee; and ASA Board (as a Council of Chapters representative and later a vice president). “Without a doubt, participation in the ASA is a valued part of my career,” Monti said.
Monti is happily retired now, but believes she certainly chose a profession that suited her well.
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