Kimberly Flagg Sellers is an American statistician. She has been the head of the statistics department 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 ...

since 2023, where she is the first Black woman in the university's history to lead a science department. Previously, Dr. Sellers was a full professor of statistics at Georgetown University and a principal researcher in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology of the United States Census Bureau, the former chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and 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 ...

. She specializes in

count data Count (feminine: countess) is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, varying in relative status, generally of middling rank in the hierarchy of nobility. Pine, L. G. ''Titles: How the King Became His Majesty''. New York: ...

and statistical dispersion, and is "the leading expert" on the

Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution In probability theory and statistics, the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson (CMP or COM–Poisson) distribution is a discrete probability distribution named after Richard W. Conway, William L. Maxwell, and Siméon Denis Poisson that generalizes the Po ...

for count data. She has also worked in the medical applications of statistics, and in

image analysis Image analysis or imagery analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophi ...

for

proteomics Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital parts of living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replication of DNA. In ...

Education

Sellers is African-American, and was born in Washington, DC. Both her parents had advanced degrees; her father, pianist Thomas Flagg, became dean of fine arts at Howard University. She set herself the goal of getting a doctorate in the mathematical sciences by the time she was in elementary school, and would read ''Black Issues in Higher Education'' with her father and look up the number of African-Americans to receive the Ph.D. in the mathematical sciences. She was a Benjamin Banneker scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park, with

Raymond L. Johnson Raymond Lewis Johnson (born 1943) is an American mathematician, currently a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Rice University. He was the first African-American student at ...

as a mentor, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at Maryland in 1994 and 1998, respectively. As a master's student at Maryland, she became interested in statistics after taking a class on the subject from Piotr Mikulski. Her master's thesis was ''Iterative methods for computing mean first passage times of Markov chains''. 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. Her dissertation was ''Vague coherent systems'', with Nozer D. Singpurwalla as her

doctoral advisor A doctoral advisor (also dissertation director, dissertation advisor; or doctoral supervisor) is a member of a university faculty whose role is to guide graduate students who are candidates for a doctorate, helping them select coursework, as well ...

Career

From 2001 to 2004, Sellers held a visiting assistant professorship and National Science Foundation supported postdoctoral scholarship at

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 ...

, where she worked with

Bill Eddy William Eddy is an American author. Currently the John C. Warner Professor of Statistics, Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University and is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association ...

and

Stephen Fienberg Stephen Elliott Fienberg (27 November 1942 – 14 December 2016) was a Professor Emeritus (formerly the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science) in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, Heinz Co ...

. In 2004, she became an assistant professor of

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experime ...

and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania. She moved to Georgetown in 2006, at a time when the university was beginning a program in statistics, and took a second affiliation with the Census Bureau in 2015.

Recognition

Sellers became an elected member of the

in 2018. She was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2021.

References

External links

Official website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sellers, Kimberly Flagg Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American statisticians Women statisticians University of Maryland, College Park alumni Columbian College of Arts and Sciences alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty Georgetown University faculty Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute Fellows of the American Statistical Association African-American statisticians