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.

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.

In celebration of Black History Month, we recognize 10 individuals from the Black/African-American collective who have made tremendous contributions to the field of statistics.

While the pandemic prevented a face-to-face event in 2020, the Bay Area Biotech-Pharma Statistical Workshop held two virtual symposiums—both related to COVID-19.

Emma Benn has collaborated on a variety of health disparities-related research projects and teaches a graduate-level course, “Race and Causal Inference,” aimed at increasing the methodologic rigor by which health disparities are investigated, with a goal of finding effective causal targets for intervention. Benn’s contributions to diversity and inclusion in statistics and STEM have been celebrated by various organizations, including Mathematically Gifted and Black.