Jacqueline Mindy-Mae Hughes-Oliver is a

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

n-born American statistician, whose research interests include

drug discovery In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by ...

and

chemometrics Chemometrics is the science of extracting information from chemical systems by data-driven means. Chemometrics is inherently interdisciplinary, using methods frequently employed in core data-analytic disciplines such as multivariate statistics, ap ...

. She is a professor in the Statistics Department of

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 ...

(NCSU).

Education and career

Hughes-Oliver was born in Jamaica, where she grew up and went to school, living with her grandmother there while her mother worked in the US, in

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

.Jacqueline M. Hughes-Oliver
, Mathematically Gifted and Black, retrieved 2017-08-21 She became a US citizen at age 12, and moved to the US at age 15. She graduated magna cum laude in mathematics from the

University of Cincinnati The University of Cincinnati (UC or Cincinnati) is a public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1819 as Cincinnati College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in Cincinnati and has an annual enrollment of over 44,00 ...

in 1986, and earned her PhD in statistics at NCSU in 1991, becoming possibly the first African-American doctorate from her department. Her dissertation, entitled "Estimation using group-testing procedures: adaptive iteration", supervised by William H. Swallow, concerned adaptive

group testing In statistics and combinatorial mathematics, group testing is any procedure that breaks up the task of identifying certain objects into tests on groups of items, rather than on individual ones. First studied by Robert Dorfman in 1943, group tes ...

. After taking a temporary position at the

University of Wisconsin at Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...

, Hughes-Oliver returned to NCSU as a faculty member in 1992. At NCSU, she directed the Exploratory Center for Cheminformatics Research, a large research group that she founded in 2005 with a large grant from the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

, and directed the graduate program in statistics beginning in 2007. She has also worked as a professor of statistics at

George Mason University George Mason University (George Mason, Mason, or GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia with an independent City of Fairfax, Virginia postal address in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. The university was origin ...

from 2011 to 2014, but kept her position at NCSU and returned to it.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2017-08-21

Awards and honors

In 2007 Hughes-Oliver was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

. She is the 2014 winner of the Blackwell-Tapia prize, awarded both for her contributions to the methodology and applications of statistics and also for her efforts to increase the diversity of the mathematical sciences. Her work also earned her recognition by

Mathematically Gifted & Black Mathematically Gifted & Black (MGB) is a website that features the accomplishments of black scholars in mathematical sciences. In addition to highlighting the work and lives of established mathematicians in the African Diaspora, the platform aims ...

as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree. She was elected to the 2022 class of Fellows of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

(AAAS).

References

External links

Home page
Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, Scott W. Williams, SUNY Buffalo {{DEFAULTSORT:Hughes-Oliver, Jacqueline Mindy-Mae Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American statisticians Women statisticians African-American statisticians 21st-century African-American scientists Jamaican academics Women mathematicians Fellows of the American Statistical Association University of Cincinnati alumni North Carolina State University alumni North Carolina State University faculty George Mason University faculty Jamaican women academics 21st-century African-American academics 21st-century American academics