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Snakes and Ladders: Challenges in Forging a Career in Statistics
As statisticians, we understand the role chance plays in building a successful career. But there is also a Central Limit Theorem in life, so that things tend to average out. This talk points up some of the tools we have to increase our mean and reduce our variance when climbing the corporate ladder, or creating a consulting network, or leveraging our skill sets to create new opportunities. It also lists some of the snakes one tends to encounter along the way and strategies for defanging or avoiding them. Going forward, our profession faces new headwinds, but the economy is tilting ever more toward a knowledge-based marketplace, and we can exploit that trend.

David Banks earned an MS in applied mathematics from Virginia Tech in 1982, followed by a PhD in statistics in 1984. He won an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences, which he took at Berkeley. In 1986, he was a visiting assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and then joined the department of statistics at Carnegie Mellon in 1987. In 1997, he went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, then served as chief statistician of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and finally joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002. In 2003, he returned to academics at Duke University.

Banks was the coordinating editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He cofounded the journal Statistics and Public Policy and served as its editor. He also cofounded the American Statistical Association's Section on National Defense and Homeland Security and chaired the Risk Analysis and Statistical Learning and Data Mining sections.

In 2003, Banks led a research program on data mining at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute; in 2008, he led a research program at the Isaac Newton Institute on Theory and Methods for Complex, High-Dimensional Data; in 2012, he led another SAMSI research program, on Computational Advertising.

He has published 74 refereed articles, edited eight books, and written four monographs.

Banks is past president of the Classification Society and has twice served on the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association. He is the president of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics.

He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He also recently won the American Statistical Association‘s Founders Award.

Banks‘ research areas include models for dynamic networks, dynamic text networks, adversarial risk analysis (i.e., Bayesian behavioral game theory), human rights statistics, agent-based models, forensics, and certain topics in high-dimensional data analysis.

For information about his talk, please visit the online program.

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