Biography:Alanna Connors
Alanna Connors (1956–2013) was a Hong Kong-born American astronomer and statistician known for her introduction and advocacy of Bayesian statistics in high-energy astronomy, and for her early use of the Python programming language in astronomy.[1]
Connors was the daughter of an airplane pilot for Pan Am; she was born in Hong Kong, where her father was based,[2] on September 25 1956. She moved to Greenwich, Connecticut as a child. She majored in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1978, and completed a Ph.D. in astronomy and physics in 1988 at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her doctoral research, conducted at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, concerned X-ray transients. Her later career included work as a researcher at the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center and as visiting faculty at Wellesley College, working with data from the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.[1]
She was a founder of the California-Harvard Astrostatistics Collaboration (CHASC), in 1997, and through it she became "a driving force of CHASC’s education mission and outreach effort, helping statisticians understand science and scientists understand statistics".[3]
She died of breast cancer on February 2, 2013.[1][2][3]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Alanna Connors (1956–2013)", Bulletin of the AAS 45 (1), 2013, https://baas.aas.org/pub/alanna-connors-1956-2013
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Alanna Connors", The Arlington Advocate, February 19, 2013, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/wickedlocal-arlington/name/alanna-connors-obituary?pid=163168098
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Meng, Xiao-Li (May 2018), "Conducting highly principled data science: A statistician's job and joy", Statistics & Probability Letters 136: 51–57, doi:10.1016/j.spl.2018.02.053; dedicated to the 20th Birthday of CHASC and to the memory of Alanna Connors
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