Alyson Gabbard Wilson (born 1967) is an American statistician known for her work on

Bayesian methods Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. Bayesian inference is an important technique in statistics, and e ...

for reliability estimation and on military applications of statistics. She is a professor of statistics at

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The universit ...

, where she is also Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives.

Education and career

Wilson graduated ''

summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sou ...

'' from Rice University in 1989. After earning a master's degree in statistics from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in 1990, she completed a Ph.D. at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

in 1995. Her dissertation, ''Statistical Models for Shapes and Deformations'', was supervised by Valen E. Johnson. After completing her doctorate, Wilson worked in the defense industry as a statistician for four years before joining the research staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1999, working on the statistical reliability of weapons. She moved to Iowa State University as an associate professor of statistics in 2008, and then moved again to the

Institute for Defense Analyses The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) is an American non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) – the Systems and Analyses Center (SAC), the Science and Technology Policy Institute ...

in 2011. She returned to academia as an associate professor at North Carolina State University in 2011, and was promoted to full professor in 2015. In 2020 she became Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives at North Carolina State.

Book

With Michael S. Hamada,

C. Shane Reese Christopher Shane Reese is an American statistician, academic administrator, and 14th president of Brigham Young University (BYU). At BYU, he previously served as Academic Vice President (AVP), dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical S ...

, and Harry F. Martz, Wilson is a co-author of the book ''Bayesian Reliability'' (Springer, 2008).

Recognition

Wilson became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2008, an Elected Member of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The institute has about 4,000 elected members from gov ...

in 2012, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015. She won the Army Wilks Award of the Conference on Applied Statistics in Defense, given periodically for "a substantial contribution to statistical methodology and application relevant to national defense" (and not to be confused with the Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Award of the American Statistical Association) in 2015. In 2018, she won the Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Statistical Association Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security.

References

External links

Home page at NCSUPersonal home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Alyson 1967 births Living people American statisticians Women statisticians Rice University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Duke University alumni Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel Iowa State University faculty North Carolina State University faculty Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Statistical Association Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute