Gladys H. Reynolds is an American statistician who did pioneering research on modeling sexually transmitted diseases. She worked for many years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was the first female chief of a CDC statistics branch, and the first statistician to serve in that role. [1]
Reynolds did her undergraduate studies at Yankton College and was encouraged by the head of the mathematics department there to go on to graduate study. She earned a master's degree in statistics at Virginia Tech, [1] and joined the CDC in 1960. [2] Five years later, she moved to Emory University as an instructor, and completed a Ph.D. there in 1973. Her dissertation, A Control Model for Gonorrhea, was one of the first works to produce a mathematical model for the sexual transmission of disease. She returned to CDC, where she headed the Evaluation and Statistical Services Branch of the Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases from 1979 to 1989, and worked in the Office of Minority Health as a senior statistician from 1989 to 2007, when she retired. She also chaired the Statistics in Epidemiology section of the American Statistical Association. [1]
As well as working on disease modeling, Reynolds worked for equality at CDC. She recalls that, when she started at CDC, there were no African-Americans there, very few women, and significant resistance to change in those areas, and that she was "very much involved in trying to hire women and minorities". [3] She served on the Equal Employment Opportunity Advisory Council from 1986 to 1987, chairing the Affirmative Action Committee in 1987, and serving as president of the Association of Executive Women of the CDC. In this work, she used her statistical expertise to set hiring goals that would achieve a representative workforce. In her work for the American Statistical Association, she also campaigned for greater representation of women and minorities in association offices and honors, and from 1996 to 2002 she chaired the association's Committee on Minorities. She also belonged to the Minority Affairs Committee of the American College of Epidemiology. [1]
Reynolds was elected as a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology in 1983, and of the American Statistical Association in 1985. She was elected to the International Statistical Institute in 1986. The CDC gave Reynolds their Award for Contributions to the Advancement of Women in 1986, and Women in Science and Engineering gave her their Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. [1]
David George Clayton, is a British statistician and epidemiologist. He is titular Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Principal Research Fellow in the Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory, where he chairs the statistics group. Clayton is an ISI highly cited researcher placing him in the top 250 most cited scientists in the mathematics world over the last 20 years.
Mary Lee Wheat Gray is an American mathematician, statistician, and lawyer. She is the author of books and papers in the fields of mathematics, mathematics education, computer science, applied statistics, economic equity, discrimination law, and academic freedom. She is currently on the Board of Advisers for POMED and is the chair of the Board of Directors of AMIDEAST.
Tamara Eugenia Awerbuch-Friedlander was an Uruguay-born Israeli-American biomathematician and public health scientist who worked at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in Boston, Massachusetts. Her primary research and publications focus on biosocial interactions that cause or contribute to disease. She also is believed to be the first female Harvard faculty member to have had a jury trial for a lawsuit filed against Harvard University for sex discrimination.
Susan Allbritton Murphy is an American statistician, known for her work applying statistical methods to clinical trials of treatments for chronic and relapsing medical conditions. She is a professor at Harvard University, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lynne Billard is an Australian statistician and professor at the University of Georgia, known for her statistics research, leadership, and advocacy for women in science. She has served as president of the American Statistical Association, and the International Biometric Society, one of a handful of people to have led both organizations.
Alice Segers Whittemore is an American epidemiologist and biostatistician who studies the effects of genetics and lifestyle on cancer, after an earlier career as a pure mathematician studying group theory. She works as a professor of health research and policy and of biomedical data science at Stanford University, and has served as president of the International Biometric Society.
Nancy Flournoy is an American statistician. Her research in statistics concerns the design of experiments, and particularly the design of adaptive clinical trials; she is also known for her work on applications of statistics to bone marrow transplantation, and in particular on the graft-versus-tumor effect. She is Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Missouri.
Jane Forer Gentleman was an American-Canadian statistician, the second female president of the Statistical Society of Canada, and the first winner of the Janet L. Norwood Award For Outstanding Achievement By A Woman In The Statistical Sciences.
Dionne L. Price was an American statistician and first African-American president of the American Statistical Association(ASA), the world's largest professional body representing statisticians. Price worked as a division director in the Office of Biostatistics of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in the US Food and Drug Administration. Her division provided statistical advice "used in the regulation of anti-infective, anti-viral, ophthalmology, and transplant drug products".
Susan S. Ellenberg is an American statistician specializing in the design of clinical trials and in the safety of medical products. She is a professor of biostatistics, medical ethics and health policy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 1993 president of the Society for Clinical Trials and the 1999 President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society.
Jana Lynn Asher is a statistician known for her work on human rights and sexual violence. She is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University. She was a co-editor of the book Statistical Methods for Human Rights with David L. Banks and Fritz Scheuren.
William Carter Jenkins was an American public health researcher and academic.
Kimberly Flagg Sellers is an American statistician. She has been the head of the statistics department at North Carolina State University since 2023, where she is the first Black woman in the university's history to lead a science department. Previously, Dr. Sellers was a full professor of statistics at Georgetown University and a principal researcher in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology of the United States Census Bureau, the former chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She specializes in count data and statistical dispersion, and is "the leading expert" on the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution for count data. She has also worked in the medical applications of statistics, and in image analysis for proteomics.
Adaora Alise Adimora was an American doctor and academic. She was the Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor of Medicine and professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Her research centered on the transmission of HIV, as well as other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), among minority populations. Her work highlighted the importance of social determinants of HIV transmission and the need for structural interventions to reduce risk. In 2019, she became an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine in recognition of her contributions.
Marcia Lynn Gumpertz is an American statistician known for her research on agricultural statistics, spatial analysis, the design of experiments, and plant disease epidemiology. She has also studied employment issues for women and members of underrepresented minorities in science and technology. She is a professor of statistics at North Carolina State University.
Susan J. Devlin is an American statistician who has contributed to highly-cited research on robust statistics and local regression.
Linda Williams Pickle is an American statistician and expert in spatial analysis and data visualization, especially as applied to disease patterns. She worked as a researcher for the National Cancer Institute, for Georgetown University, and for the National Center for Health Statistics before becoming a statistics consultant and adjunct professor of geography and public health services at Pennsylvania State University.
Clarice Ring Weinberg is an American biostatistician and epidemiologist who works for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as principal investigator in the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch. Her research concerns environmental epidemiology, and its combination with genetics in susceptibility to disease, including running the Sister Study on how environmental and genetic effects can lead to breast cancer. She has also published highly cited research on fertility.
Holly B. Shulman is an American statistician in the Division of Reproductive Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a developer of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System for the CDC, and the former president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. As well as her work on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, her publications include highly cited work on abortion-related deaths.