Donna Jean Brogan, professor emeritus at Emory University, has worked in biostatistical research in the areas of women’s health, mental health, and psychosocial health statistics.
Born in 1939, Brogan earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Gettysburg College in 1960, entering a profession that offered women few meaningful opportunities. Job listings were divided into “Help Wanted—Male” and “Help Wanted—Female,” and despite earning the highest math aptitude score during an IBM interview, she was offered a secretarial position. Technical roles, she was told, were for men.
Rather than abandon mathematics, Brogan chose another path. She enrolled in graduate school, earning a master’s degree in statistics from Purdue University and continuing to a PhD program at Iowa State University. There, she confronted discrimination more directly. When denied access to graduate family housing because it was designated for men only, Brogan appealed the decision by writing letters and persisting until the policy changed. She became the first woman allowed to live in that housing, an experience that marked a turning point from advocating for herself to advocating for broader, systemic change.
In 1967, Brogan completed her doctorate and received multiple tenure-track job offers, ultimately joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She went on to build a distinguished career in biostatistics, with research that focused heavily on women’s health. Widely recognized for her work in breast cancer statistics, she contributed to how researchers understood risk, diagnosis, and outcomes, while also advancing methods in sample survey design and public health research.
Brogan’s influence reached well beyond her research contributions. In 1971, she co-founded the Caucus for Women in Statistics, helping to create professional networks and institutional support for women in a field where they had long been excluded. That same year, she joined Emory University, where she broke additional barriers as the first female faculty member in the Department of Statistics and Biometry, the first female full professor at the Rollins School of Public Health, and the fourth female full professor at Emory’s School of Medicine. During her 34-year career at Emory, she became known as a dedicated educator, mentor, and collaborator. The Donna Brogan lecture, held every April at Emory, is in honor of her significant contributions.
In 2020, Rollins established the endowed Donna J. Brogan Professorship in Biostatistics, and Amita Manatunga was the first named in that role.
Brogan retired from Emory in 2004 and continues to consult and share her expertise—whether through seminars on complex survey methods or lectures on the mathematics of challenge-level square dancing.
To find out more about Donna Brogan, read this interview with her from 2017 or download the CHANCE article she wrote, “Challenging Sex Discrimination: Reflections over Seven Decades.”
Leave a Reply