Participant Biographies
Statistics Career Day
Sponsored by the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association
March 12, 2011
Campus Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Arnold Barnett is George Eastman Professor of Management Science at MIT. He majored in
Physics in college and holds a PhD in Mathematics. His research specialty is applied
statistical analysis generally focused on problems of health and safety. Among his particular
interests are crime statistics, war casualty patterns, aviation safety, aviation security, and
presidential elections. He teaches courses at MIT on Probability and Statistics, and is
completing a textbook on the subject.
Joe Blitzstein is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, having moved from
the Bay Area to the Bay State in 2006 after completing his Ph.D. in Mathematics (with a M.S.
in Statistics) at Stanford University, advised by Persi Diaconis. His research interests include
modeling and sampling in networks, especially with applications in sociology and public health,
and Monte Carlo methods. Blitzstein's undergraduate probability course, Stat 110, has grown
to over 250 students from fewer than 80 since he started teaching it in 2006. For his teaching,
he received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize in 2009 (awarded to 3 faculty per year
Harvard-wide). With David Harrington, Blitzstein is Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in
Statistics, overseeing and advising for a growth of the statistics major from 8 to 55 in the last
few years. Blitzstein is also a chess expert and serves as faculty adviser to the Harvard Chess
Club.
Matt Calder has a PhD in Mathematical Statistics and Probability from Colorado State
University. In the year prior to graduation, he consulted in NYC. For three months he worked in
the top of one of the Twin Towers. Reflecting on that time, “Working with really smart people
and getting paid exorbitantly (I was a graduate student, so, put that in context), this was the life
for me.” When he returned to school, he finished his degree and found a job with a hedge fund
in Wayland, MA. A group of two recent PhD's and an MIT professor were using time series
analysis and machine learning to trade financial instruments. Matt worked there for 10 years,
forming a core experience. He had the privilege of working within a number of the areas that
constitute Mathematics in the Finance Industry, and has gained a perspective that he is glad to
share with students. He states “That gig ended rather fabulously, a story I'm sure will engage
the audience.” He wandered into a completely different area from there, natural language
processing and information harvesting, but am now back in finance. He and a few others have
started a risk consultancy business. Matt’s interests center on mathematics and computing and
he considers his work to be essentially creative, an art. Statistics and Mathematics form the
ethos, and computing, the tools of that art. Within the sphere of theory his interests are in
machine learning and automated decision processes. Within the sphere of computing, his
interests are numerical methods and innovative technology.
Steven Correia works for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and currently
supervises the Survey and Assessment program of the Massachusetts Division of Marine
Fisheries. His program is responsible for conducting fisheries independent surveys and
provides technical support for in the development and evaluation of options for managing our
fisheries. Interests include analyzing time series of trawl survey data, estimating demographic
changes in fish populations, designing experiments and analyzing the biological and economic
impacts of management measures in the fisheries. Steven trained as a marine biologist for his
undergraduate degree and worked on differentiating species of tapeworms based on hook
morphology. His favorite part of the job is working on a variety of problems that encompass
many fields and working with many people. In the past three months, he has developed
estimates of abundance, sex ratios, and size structure of horseshoe crabs, designed and
analyzed a bacteriological laboratory proficiency study, estimated survival rates in several
smelt populations, examined changes in the geographic and depth distribution of finfish in
Massachusetts Bay and he has analyzed a time series of white shark sightings data. After
more than 26 years on the job, he is still thrilled when he finds the unexpected in a batch of
data.
Mark Glickman is Associate Professor in the Health Policy and Management department at
the Boston University School of Public Health, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Health
Quality, Outcomes and Economics Research, a Veterans Administration Center of Excellence.
Mark received his bachelor's degree in Statistics from Princeton University in 1986, and his
doctoral degree in Statistics in 1993 from Harvard University. He is well-known for inventing
several rating systems for competitors in games and sports. Mark has had a long-standing
interest in the application of statistical methods to rating tournament chess players, and has
been chair of the U.S. Chess Federation's Ratings Committee for over 15 years. He has
cofounded and co-organized the New England Symposia on Statistics in Sports (NESSIS)
held at Harvard University in 2007 and 2009, and will co-organize the 2011 NESSIS as well.
Additionally, Mark is interested in statistical applications to health services problems, with
recent interest in measuring the effects of varying medication prescription adherence to health
outcomes. Mark is also the editor of the "Here's to your Health" column in Chance magazine.
Alane Izu is a current PhD student in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University.
Her doctoral dissertation focuses on Bayesian methods of identifying and comparing branching
tree structures that can be applied to modeling the development of resistant Tuberculosis (TB)
strains. Before starting her dissertation, she received a B.S. in Statistics from BYU and a
Master’s degree in Biostatistics at Harvard University. She then returned to San Jose, where
she worked as a substitute teacher for the local High School district. After a period of time,
she had the opportunity to use her statistical knowledge working as an intern for Novartis
Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland. Her favorite pastime is playing soccer. She also has a
passion for teaching.
Joseph Massaro received his BA in Mathematics in 1985 from Boston College, then his M.A.
and Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1989 and 1994 from Boston University. His Ph.D. work focused
on statistical analyses. In 1986, while in his first year of graduate school, he worked in data
entry for 2 years in the biotech industry, and then in 1988 found a job as a statistical
programmer at Quintiles, a company providing clinical trial services to the pharmaceutical
industry, while working on his Ph.D. After receiving his Ph.D. he was promoted to Senior
Biostatistician and eventually Associate Director of Statistics and Data Management at
Quintiles. In 1998, he left Quintiles to join Boston University where he is currently Associate
Professor of Biostatistics, focusing on teaching courses in clinical trials, while also still serving
as an independent statistical consultant to the biotech, pharma and medical device industries.
As part of his duties at BU, he is also a statistician on the Framingham Heart Study.
Sachiko Miyahara is originally from Japan and received B.A. and M.S. in Statistics from the
University of Connecticut. During the junior year at the university, she had to select her major.
She went through the list of departments, eliminated all social science majors (due to her poor
English), eliminated all hard core science majors, and only mathematics and statistics were
left. Since she thought mathematics was scary, she chose statistics as a major. At that time
she did not know, but later she realized it was a very smart choice. Currently, she is happily
working as a senior statistician at Harvard School of Public Health after receiving PhD in
Biostatistics at University of Pittsburgh.
Katherine Monti earned her BA in Mathematics at Oberlin College and her PhD in
Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Following graduation she joined the faculty in the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer
Science Department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Three years later she went to
work at Ralston Purina Company, working half time while she raised her sons. Thirteen years
later she moved with her family to Boston, where she has worked for Ciba Corning Diagnostics
(now owned by Bayer), Astra Pharmaceuticals (now Astra Zeneca), and Rho, Inc. Rho is a
consulting company serving large and small clients in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry.
Dr. Monti has also participated in professional service activities as Secretary then President of
the Boston Chapter of the American Statistical Association, Chair of the ASA's Advisory
Committee for Continuing Education (the committee that organizes short courses at the annual
statistics meetings), a member of the Board of Directors of the ASA, as Chair and other roles
for the Biopharmaceutical Section of the ASA, and in various other capacities.
Lisa Sullivan has a PhD in Statistics and is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health. She is also Associate Dean for
Education. She teaches Elementary Biostatistics for MPH students and lectures in biostatistical
methods for clinical researchers. Lisa is the Principal Investigator of the National Heart, Lung,
and Blood’s Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics, which is designed to promote
interest in the field of biostatistics and to expose students to the many exciting career
opportunities available to them. Lisa is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including
the Norman A. Scotch award and the prestigious Metcalf Award, both for excellence in
teaching at Boston University. In 2008 she won the Associations for Schools of Public
Health/Pfizer Excellence in Teaching Award. Lisa is also a biostatistician on the Framingham
Heart Study working primarily in developing and disseminating cardiovascular risk functions.
She is active in several large-scale epidemiological studies for adverse pregnancy outcomes
and in multidisciplinary research projects in prenatal diagnosis, obstetrics, autism,
cardiovascular disease, and emergency medicine. She has published two books: Essentials of
Biostatistics in Public Health (currently in its second edition), and Introductory Applied
Biostatistics. Her work has also resulted in over 160 peer-reviewed publications.