Kimberly Sellers

Kimberly Ann Flagg Sellers is an American statistician. She is an associate professor of statistics at Georgetown University,[1] a principal researcher in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology of the United States Census Bureau,[2] the former chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association,[2][3] and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.[4] She specializes in count data and statistical dispersion, and is "the leading expert" on the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution for count data.[2][3] She has also worked in the medical applications of statistics, and in image analysis for proteomics.[5] In 2018, she was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month Honoree.[6]

Education

Sellers is African-American, and was born in Washington, DC.[3][7] Both her parents had advanced degrees;[5] her father, pianist Thomas Flagg, became dean of fine arts at Howard University.[8] She set herself the goal of getting a doctorate in the mathematical sciences by the time she was in elementary school,[3] and would read Black Issues in Higher Education with her father and pick out the names of the African-American mathematicians in it.[5]

She was a Benjamin Banneker scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park,[7] with Raymond L. Johnson as a mentor,[3][7] and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at Maryland in 1994 and 1998, respectively.[2][9] As a master's student at Maryland, she became interested in statistics after taking a class on the subject from Piotr Mikulski.[3][8] Her master's thesis was Iterative methods for computing mean first passage times of Markov chains.[10]

She completed her Ph.D. in statistics at George Washington University in 2001, supported by the Gates Millennium Scholars Program as one of their first cohort of students.[2] Her dissertation was Vague coherent systems, with Nozer D. Singpurwalla as her doctoral advisor.[7][10][11]

Career

From 2001 to 2004, Sellers held a visiting assistant professorship and National Science Foundation supported postdoctoral scholarship at Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked with Bill Eddy and Stephen Fienberg.[7] In 2004, she became an assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.[9] She moved to Georgetown in 2006, at a time when the University was beginning a program in statistics,[7] and took a second affiliation with the Census Bureau in 2015.[9]

References
  1. Full-Time Faculty, Georgetown University Department of Mathematics and Statistics, retrieved 2019-06-14
  2. "Kimberly F. Sellers", A Statistician's Life, Celebrating Women in Statistics, AmStat News, March 1, 2018
  3. "Kimberly Sellers", Mathematically Gifted and Black, 2018, retrieved 2019-06-14
  4. Individual members, International Statistical Institute, retrieved 2019-06-14
  5. Morrissey, Katherine (September 2007), "Dr. Kimberly Sellers Sees Numbers in Images", Learning @ Georgetown, Georgetown University, archived from the original on 2010-06-13
  6. "Kimberly Sellers". Mathematically Gifted & Black.
  7. Williams, Scott W., "Kimberly Flagg Sellers", Black Women in Mathematics, University at Buffalo Mathematics Department, retrieved 2019-06-14
  8. "Who inspires you?", AmStat News, September 1, 2015
  9. Curriculum vitae (PDF), November 23, 2018, retrieved 2019-06-14
  10. Master's thesis and dissertation titles from WorldCat Identities, retrieved 2019-06-14.
  11. Kimberly Sellers at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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