Suzanne Thornton’s interest in statistics blossomed when she took her first course in college. While attending JSM, she discovered a program covering interesting research and topics that she, as a queer woman, had never felt welcome to discuss with her predominantly straight, male instructors. Now a professor of statistics at Swarthmore, she works on ways statistics education can be modernized and brought to a wider population and ultimately increase the diversity of the field.
Jessica K. Kohlschmidt grew up in Houston, Texas, with five siblings. A first-generation college student, she had a passion for math from a young age. She has taught full and part time at colleges since 1999 and is currently is a PhD biostatistician at the Clara D. Bloomfield Center for Leukemia Outcomes Research at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is also a longtime officer of the Caucus for Women in Statistics, serving for 10 years as secretary and, in 2018, becoming the first executive director.
Dooti Roy spent her weekends as a child in Kolkata working on puzzles and combinatorics and reading storybooks. She was introduced to statistics when she was 16 and enjoyed it so much that she earned a graduate fellowship to pursue her PhD in the US. Today, she works as a methodologist at Boehringer Ingelheim, Inc., where her days are spent learning, researching, and implementing statistical methods to make clinical trials more efficient. Even though her job is challenging, she learns constantly and solves meaningful and complex problems to help patients in need. Recently, she has been mentoring younger statisticians and actively volunteers her time on several ASA committees, including the Antiracism Task Force.
Lucy D’Agostino McGowan spent the beginning of her childhood in Boston, Massachusetts, and the rest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she lives today as a biostatistician, teacher, science communicator, podcaster, partner, mom, programmer, Disney enthusiast, and BB-8 builder. She fell in love with the statistics field after doing a Summer Institute in Biostatistics at Boston University. D’Agostino McGowan is also an avid statistical communicator. Her efforts in statistical communication span from op-eds about the current COVID-19 pandemic; a podcast in partnership with the American Journal of Epidemiology, Casual Inference; and outreach via social media. Her research focuses on causal inference, human-data interaction, and statistical communication. She is currently the chair of the ASA Committee on Women in Statistics and co-leads an effort with past-chair Stephanie Hicks to build community and engagement. Follow their Twitter feed at @WomeninStat.
At a young age, Elizabeth Ogburn’s plan was to stay in school forever. In college, she studied philosophy and math and tried everything from epidemiology to data analysis, but nothing stuck. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do until she attended a talk about causal inference and knew that was the perfect fit. Now, as a Johns Hopkins faculty member, she loves being part of the broader causal inference community, with its connections to social science, computer science, theoretical and applied statistics, and, of course, public health.
