Shawn Simpson loved math and computers as a kid and thought soldering extra chips into her PlayStation was cool, so she resolved to major in electrical engineering in college. It wasn’t until she was analyzing LIDAR data that it became clear how powerful statistics was as a field and she decided to earn her PhD in statistics. Currently, as principal data scientist on the AI Labs team at BlackRock in New York City, she leads a group that builds tools for traders powered by statistics and machine learning. Her advice to young statisticians? Don’t do this alone; reach out to others for support and feedback.
Celebrating Women in Statistics
Nandini Kannan
Nandini Kannan was born in Bhopal, India, and completed her schooling in Mumbai and New Delhi. She enjoyed solving math puzzles as a child, inheriting her love of mathematics from her father, a mathematician. After completing a master’s degree at the University of Madras, Kannan joined the University of Pittsburgh to work with C. R. Rao. She is proud of her work at the National Science Foundation developing interdisciplinary research and training programs in data science and is passionate about the critical role science and technology play in this global interconnected society. Kannan is committed to developing and supporting initiatives that address diversity and equity in the STEM workforce.
Christy Chuang-Stein
Christy Chuang-Stein grew up in an isolated city on the east coast of Taiwan. Both her parents were high-school teachers, and she remembers doing math lessons with her mother while other kids played outside. Yes, she resented the extra lessons at the time, but those lessons served her well and she ended up majoring in math in college. In the 90s, Chuang-Stein represented Pfizer (then Pharmacia) in presenting their HIV trial data at an FDA Antiviral Drugs Advisory Committee meeting to review statistical evidence for using viral load as a surrogate for clinical outcome in assessing HIV treatments. It is hard for her to describe the sense of exhilaration when her team’s endeavors lead to profound improvement in people’s lives.
Sandy Griffith
Always drawn to science in one form or another, Sandy Griffith started college as a biochemistry major, but her clumsy nature lent itself better to handling data instead of beakers and chemicals. Throughout her career, she has gravitated toward applied medical research with the potential to affect the lives of patients. In her current role at Flatiron Health, Griffith works with real-world data derived from electronic health records in oncology. Her proudest moments have involved communicating complex statistical concepts to nonstatistical audiences in an approachable way by weaving in personal stories that carry emotional resonance.
Simina Boca
Simina Boca grew up in Bucharest, Romania, and participated in many math contests as a kid. Her best result was fourth place nationally in the ninth grade, but she was pretty sure she didn’t want to focus on pure math as a career. When she attended a genetics class her senior year in high school in the United States, she discovered biostatistics and majored in math at the University of Illinois. Along the way, she realized she enjoyed working with data and thinking about data. From a professional perspective, her proudest moment was convincing collaborators to rerun an experiment because the initial one had pronounced batch effects that could not be fixed at the analysis stage.
Celebrating Women in Statistics 2021
In honor of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating 15 ASA women who work in statistics and data science. These accomplished women were chosen because they mentor and influenced other women in their field. Read their biographies and find out why they chose statistics, who influenced them, and what they have accomplished.
Janet Wittes
Janet Wittes was leaning toward a major in biochemistry at Radcliffe College until faculty mentor John Edsall noted her preference for inference and guided her to statistics. In 1970, with two toddlers in tow, Wittes and her husband—physician Robert E. Wittes—moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where she worked part time as a postdoctoral researcher with Jerome Cornfield at The George Washington University and he served in the USPHS Commissioned Corps as a Yellow Beret. She founded a consulting firm, Statistics Collaborative, in 1990 and remains its president.
Alyson G. Wilson
Alyson G. Wilson’s interest in statistics grew out of a summer internship in the clinical statistics department of Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company in North Carolina. This was the first time she understood how math could be applied to real-world problems. Today, she is a professor in the department of statistics and associate vice chancellor for national security and special research initiatives, and her work has contributed to improving the use of data and quantitative methods in defense.
Gayle S. Bieler
Gayle S. Bieler worked part time from her home for more than 15 years, until she became inspired by data science and the happenings in the Obama administration. That is when she took a risk and started something new. Six years later, she is leading a team of 24 talented data scientists at RTI.
Celebrating Rising Undergraduate Women in Statistics and Data Science
We invited rising undergraduate stars Audrey Bertin, Taneisha Arora, Sarah Zimmermann, and Ziwei “Crystal” Zang to answer a few questions in celebration of Women’s History Month.