Emma K. T. Benn questioned why racial/ethnic minorities were not adequately represented in the field of biostatistics. Eventually, she co-founded the BEST Diversity Program, a summer program to expose under-represented minorities, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities to biostatistics and its applications to cardiovascular research and public health more generally.
A Statistician's Life
Daniela Witten
Daniela Witten is the recipient of a number of honors, including an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and the Gertrude Cox Scholarship. She is committed to translating key concepts in statistical machine learning to a broad scientific audience and is also a co-author of the extremely popular textbook, Introduction to Statistical Learning.
Bhramar Mukherjee
Born a highly competitive math nerd, Bhramar Mukherjee rose through the academic ranks while being a full-time single parent with no family support. Now a professor of biostatistics, she is also associate director for cancer control and population sciences at the University of Michigan comprehensive cancer center.
Dalene K. Stangl
As a first-generation college student, Dalene Stangl studied psychology and sociology at Iowa State University, but it was her research in the area of mental health that convinced her to pursue a PhD in statistics. Among her many achievements, she garnered four strategic initiative awards—one that kick-started the popular Celebrating Women in Statistics and Data Science conference.
Hao Helen Zhang
Hao Helen Zhang was born and raised in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China. From a young age, she was passionate about mathematics. Since then, her research has been supported by NSF, NIH, and NSA. She also serves on several editorial boards of professional journals.
Dawn Woodard
After receiving tenure at Cornell, Dawn Woodard went on sabbatical at Microsoft Research, where she created travel time prediction methods for use in Bing Maps. She then transitioned to a role at Uber, building and leading their Marketplace Optimization Data Science organization, which is one of the premier data science teams at Uber and includes specialists in operations research, economics, statistics, and machine learning.
Linda J. Young
When Linda Young went to the Oklahoma City zoo with a team working to determine why the golden marmosets were getting sick, she knew she wanted to be a statistician. Young has since explored her interests in agriculture, the environment, and education and, recently, has worked with others to explore the potential of web scraping to develop list frames for surveys.
Bin Yu
Bin Yu was born in Harbin, China, and grew up during the Cultural Revolution. When she was little, her cousin gave her a math book that hooked her on math. Bin’s current research interests focus on statistics and machine learning algorithms and theory for solving high-dimensional data problems. She shares her knowledge by serving on many editorial boards from different societies.
Xihong Lin
Xihong Lin gained an interest in statistics while working on her undergraduate thesis on analysis of time-series data. She currently works on whole genome sequencing association studies, genes and environment, integrative analysis of different types of data using causal mediation analysis, and analysis of electronic medical records.
Sharon Lohr
Sharon Lohr became a statistician because she liked math, but did not want to be restricted to one narrow area of scholarship. In 2014, she became the first woman to give the Deming Lecture.