Women In Data Science

Kristian’s interest in statistics and algorithmic fairness has taken her on a winding career path from academia to business, to public service, and back to academia. As she has made different career changes, she didn’t decide between academia vs. industry vs. non-profit, it was more about the problem she was interested in working on at the moment, and what else is happening in her life. After she earned her PhD in Statistical Science from Duke University, she worked as a research professor at Virginia Tech where she did microsimulation and agent-based modelingin a simulation lab. After that, she tried a data visualization and analytics startup called DataPad that was quickly acquired. When she was thinking about her next step in her career, she wanted to do something with social impact.She was fascinated by the work of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) that was applying statistical models to casualty data to estimate the number of undocumented conflict casualties. She spent a summer working for HRD