Dr. Marie Davidian – Not Your Average Statistician
Statistician Dr. Marie Davidian, in SAS Hall, is working to build public understanding of statistics. It’s no mean feat.
For as long as Marie Davidian can remember, statistics has been a dreaded field. When she tells people she’s a statistician, she doesn’t usually get warm responses. The statistics professor thinks the aversion stems from how poorly the discipline was once taught.
“Traditionally it wasn’t taught as a subject that was really useful,” she says.
But thanks to a major data explosion, statistics is getting a lot of attention in the scientific and popular media. In the past year the Boston Globe, American Journal of Science and Nature have devoted entire editions to data and described the field as “hot.” A watershed event occurred in 2009 when Google chief economist Hal Varian described statisticians as this decade’s “sexy professional.” And dead-on predictions of the 2012 and 2008 presidential elections by statistician Nate Silver were hailed as genius.
“So now we are sexy—it’s great— and this helps raise awareness of how important statistics is,” Davidian says.