Registration opens May 1 for the 30th Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium (BASS XXX), which will be held in person October 23–25 at the Holiday Inn Savannah Historic District in Savannah, Georgia.
Additional Features
ASA, GMU Team on Project to Assess Health of Federal Statistical Agencies
Recently, a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded a collaboration between the American Statistical Association and George Mason University to assess the health of the federal statistical agencies. A team made up of ASA members will begin reporting their assessment in the first quarter of 2024, with updates annually thereafter.
Data Science and Literacy Education Bill Gets Bipartisan Introduction
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), Rep. Jim Baird (R-IN), Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), and Rep. Young Kim (R-CA) introduced the Data Science and Literacy Act in the House of Representatives February 14, following advocacy by the ASA and its members that formally kicked off at the Joint Statistical Meetings.
Significance Writing Competition Open for Entries
Learn about the 2023 Statistical Excellence Award for Early Career Writing, jointly organized by Significance and the Young Statisticians Section of the Royal Statistical Society.
Pamela McGovern
Pamela McGovern grew up in Connecticut and majored in mathematics in college while working as an actuarial intern during the summer. Being an actuary seemed like a good fit for a math major, but the job also exposed her to statistics and she changed course. McGovern went on to earn a master’s degree at the University of Connecticut. Through the ASA, she learned about career opportunities in the federal government and decided to pursue a mathematical statistician position. After graduating, she began her career in the federal statistical system at the US Census Bureau. She currently works as a senior mathematical statistician at the US Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service. Throughout her 27-year career as a federal statistician, her work has focused on survey statistics and methodology.
Leah Jager
Leah Jager was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her dad was a college mathematics professor and her mom taught middle-school math and English. From a young age, she liked playing school and hoped to someday be a professor like her dad. Jager’s first encounter with statistics occurred during a summer internship in a food lab within the R&D division at Amway Corporation. The goal of her project was to improve the taste of a beverage using varying concentrations of a flavor additive. She never succeeded in making the drink taste better, but she did become interested in statistics. Today, as a statistics and biostatistics professor at Johns Hopkins, she is inspired when she sees a student realize the relevance statistics has in their life.
Cathy O’Neil
Cathy O’Neil grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and was always interested in both music and math. She entered finance in 2007, right before the credit crisis, and became alarmed by what she saw as the misuse of mathematics as an intimidating cover used to exploit less sophisticated investors. In 2011, she became a data scientist and joined Occupy Wall Street. It was there she saw how data science was being used to make lucky people luckier and unlucky people unluckier. The result was the book Weapons of Math Destruction and the formation of her algorithmic auditing company, ORCAA. The mission of ORCAA is to develop standards around algorithmic accountability in general and algorithmic fairness towards individuals in protected classes specifically.
Kathy Ensor
As an undergraduate, Kathy Ensor was fascinated by probability, statistical graphics, statistical theory, and computers. At age 19, she wrote a Fortran program that could play chess and optimize the next move based on a simplistic probabilistic algorithm and data gleaned from the user of the program. She was thrilled to eventually land in a statistics career, though, as it captured all her interests. Hired at Rice University, she built the statistics department from the ground up and served as chair from 1999–2013. In 2021, she was elected president of the ASA and established the IDEA Forum to showcase how statisticians improve lives. While Ensor believes all these accomplishments are important, she says she derives her energy and continued commitment to the profession from the amazing community of statisticians and data scientists, her collaborators, doctoral alumni, and students whom she mentored throughout the years.
Statisticians Contribute to Climate Science, Policy
Scientists, economists, and social scientists are collaborating to improve our understanding of and predictions for how Earth’s changing climate will affect humanity and the ecological and social systems upon which life relies.
Denise A. Abreu
Growing up, Denise Abreu’s favorite subject was math. Thinking math and computer science were the same thing, she attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook to major in computer science. To her amazement, she genuinely enjoyed deriving maximum likelihood estimators, finding means and standard deviations, and doing matrix algebra more than she did programing, thus she switched majors. Today, Abreu is a mathematical statistician who has served within the federal statistical system for more than 23 years, first at the Census Bureau and then at the US Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service.