On UN World Toilet Day (November 19), we honor statisticians such as John Snow, who traced cholera to a London pump in 1854, and Florence Nightingale, whose data showed sanitation could cut hospital deaths from 42% to 2%.
Statisticians in History
Kate Holladay Claghorn: First Female ASA Fellow, Activist Statistician
The first woman elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Kate Claghorn was more than a pioneer—she was a fearless advocate.
Dionne Price
Dionne Price, the first African-American president of the American Statistical Association was widely respected for her work advancing statistical science and policy, as well as her commitment to mentoring, diversity, and inclusion in the field.
Grace Wahba
In 2025 Grace Wahba was awarded the International Prize in Statistics in recognition of her groundbreaking work on smoothing splines, which has transformed modern data analysis and machine learning.
Peggy Carr
Peggy Carr’s journey began in Cleveland, Ohio, where her family moved during The Great Migration. Carr was the first person of color in executive management at the National Center for Education Statistics and among the first to join the Federal Senior Executive Service.
Donna Brogan
Over nearly four decades, Brogan made significant contributions to biostatistics, particularly in sample survey design and public health research, including work that informed breast cancer studies and population-level health data.
Paul Dixon Minton
Funded primarily by a training grant from the National Institutes of Health for training biostatisticians, Minton established a new Department of Statistics at Southern Methodist University in 1962.
Gladys H. Reynolds
Gladys Reynolds was the first woman and the first statistician to serve as the head of a statistics branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Egon S. Pearson
Egon Sharpe Pearson was a leading figure on the world statistical scene and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.
Katherine Wallman
Her positions as chief statistician of the United States from 1992 to 2017 and 1992 ASA president only begin to capture her legacy as a leader, friend, and champion of government statistics and statistical literacy.