Carla Cotwright-Williams

Cotwright-Williams is the daughter of a police officer. She grew up in South Central Los Angeles, moving to a better neighborhood in Los Angeles as a teenager. She went to Westchester High School[1] and attended summer enrichment programs for underrepresented students there that included courses at the University of California, Los Angeles and a field trip to see the Space Shuttle at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base.[1][2] She graduated in 1991.[3]

She struggled as an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach, starting in engineering. As a math major, she struggled initially and earning low enough grades to be academically disqualified from the university, but worked hard to return as a student in good standing eventually earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2000. She then earned a master's degrees in mathematics from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2002.[1][4] Initially intending to follow a science & math Ph.D. track, she was persuaded to shift to pure mathematics under the mentorship of an African-American professor, Dr. Stella R. Ashford,[1][2] who became the supervisor for her master's thesis in number theory, Unique Factorization in Bi-Quadratic Number Fields.[3]

She went on to doctoral studies at the University of Mississippi, where she became president of the Graduate Student Council[5] and earned a second master's degree there along the way in 2004.[1][4] She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi in 2006. Her dissertation concerned matroid theory; it was Clones and Minors in Matroids, with T. James Reid as her doctoral advisor.[6] She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the university,[5] and was part of a group of four African-Americans who all graduated in the same year.[7][8]

After completing her doctorate, Cotwright-Williams worked as a tenure-track faculty member in mathematics at Wake Forest University, Hampton University, and Norfolk State University.[1][9] While working there, in an effort to shift her career to a government track, she began studying public policy and working on collaborative research on Bayesian network based drone control systems with NASA, and on a US Navy project involving measurement uncertainty.[1][5] In 2010, she completed a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy Analysis at Old Dominion University.[4] She applied for an American Mathematical Society Congressional Fellowship, and was turned down on her first application but succeeded in her second, in 2012.[1][5][9]

While a Congressional Fellow she worked as a staffer on the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and her responsibilities included responding to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.[1][5][10] In 2014 she worked on data quality for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and in 2015 she became Hardy-Apfel IT Fellow at the Social Security Administration.[5] Her work at the Social Security Administration has included business analytics to prevent fraud and support data warehousing.[4] In 2018, with the fellowship expiring, she moved again to the United States Department of Defense as a data scientist.[1][11]

Cotwright-Williams continues to hold an adjunct professorial lecturer position in mathematics and statistics at American University.[12] She is the Outside of Academia Member in the National Association of Mathematicians.[10][13] Her work has earned her recognition by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.[14]