Dominican Republic

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.