Melody Goodman began her undergraduate studies as a pre-med student. During her first semester, she heard senior pre-med students talking about cat lab, where you dissect a cat, and she dropped the pre-med major the next day. After a long period of being undecided, she changed her major to applied mathematics and statistics. She fell in love with combinatorics and game theory and eventually landed a job on Wall Street; she didn’t like it. After googling “math in health,” she learned about biostatistics and went to graduate school. She is now the associate dean for research and an associate professor of biostatistics at the NYU School of Global Public Health and working to educate the general public about quantitative public health data literacy and expose racial and ethnically diverse students to biostatistics and data science.
Celebrating Black History Month 2022
Therri Usher
Therri Usher always enjoyed mathematics, even competing in competitions during high school. Despite this, others encouraged her to pursue a career as a medical doctor, so she entered college as a pre-med student. However, when she was offered the opportunity to work in a biology lab researching sickle cell disease and conducting data analysis, she changed her major to biostatistics with a specialization in statistics. After completing her PhD, Therri joined the US Food and Drug Administration, where she applies statistical theories and methods used in the regulation of drug products to treat viral infections and rare diseases.