Martinez, who served as an active member of the US Army Signal Corps for several years, became interested in data science when pursuing her PhD at George Mason University. She held the position of science and technology program officer at the Office of Naval Research, where she established a research portfolio comprised of academia and industry performers developing data science products for the future Navy and Marine Corps.
A Statistician's Life
Rebecca Doerge
As a first-generation student, Doerge studied theoretical mathematics at the University of Utah. There, she gained an interest in both computing and human genetics. Now dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University, she has earned mentoring awards and was elected Fellow of the AAAS and ASA in 2007.
Alicia Laura Carriquiry
Carriquiry hated her first job, and this motivated her to pursue a graduate degree, which eventually led her to become the first female full professor of statistics at Iowa State. Since then, she has mentored 20 doctoral students and was principal investigator on a large award that helped establish the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence.
Rachel Schutt
When Rachel Schutt was five years old, her father realized her primary school was directing the girls to practice knitting while the boys solved math problems. He intervened and came to the class to teach the girls set theory. Her interest in math persisted and she went on to become one of the first chief data scientists of a Fortune 500 company.
Susan A. Murphy
Susan Murphy always loved mathematics and made it a career when she realized statistics could use mathematics to improve our society. In 2013 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision making.
Michelle C. Dunn
Michelle Dunn fell in love with statistics on her way to freshman year at Harvard, after studying for a quantitative reasoning test. Now, she is CTO and co-founder of Data Collaboratory, a technology company that builds data science tools—and a company she built from the ground up. Michelle’s goal is to continue to put into action what she has learned about leadership from her hero, statistician and hiring manager Brenda Edwards.
Kelly H. Zou
Zou is a native of Shanghai, and her work on receiver operating characteristic analysis has led to her being the recipient of the Stauffer Award for the best article published in Academic Radiology. She has received multiple prizes in the ASA Biopharmaceutical Section’s poster competitions and Statistical Significance contests and held a number of leadership roles.
Sally C. Morton
The daughter of two immigrant doctors, Sally Morton has focused her career on health policy with the objective of using statistics to help patients and their families make better health care decisions. She chose to study statistics because she enjoyed applied mathematics and desired a career with the potential for helping people live a better life.
Montse Fuentes
Montse Fuentes began her journey as a pianist, but developed an interest in statistics as a way to transform data into knowledge. As a dean now, promoting inclusive excellence and bringing leadership opportunities and career success to women and minorities is a priority for her.
Amy Herring
Amy Herring always asked questions and never said no to an opportunity, even when it involved being a team statistician for her high-school basketball team. Now, she loves to bring research topics into the classroom and is consistently on the lookout for potential statistics scholars to recruit.