Biography:Carla Cotwright-Williams
Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams | |
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| Alma mater | California State University, Long Beach Southern University University of Mississippi |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions | Department of Defense American University |
| Thesis | Clones and minors in matroids (2006) |
| Doctoral advisor | T. James Reid |
Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams (born November 6) is an American mathematician who works as a Technical Director and Data Scientist for the United States Department of Defense.[1] She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Mississippi.
Early life and education
She is the daughter of a police officer and grew up in South Central Los Angeles. Moving to a better neighborhood in Los Angeles as a teenager. She went to Westchester High School[1] and attended summer enrichment programs for underrepresented students there that included courses at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a field trip to see the Space Shuttle at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base.[1][2] She graduated in 1991.
As an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach, Cotwright-Williams started in engineering. Then, as a math major, she struggled initially and earned low enough grades to be academically disqualified from the university, but worked hard to return as a student in good standing, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2000. She then earned a master's degree in mathematics from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2002.[1][3] Initially intending to follow a science & math Ph.D. track, she was persuaded to shift to pure mathematics under the mentorship of an African-American professor, Stella R. Ashford,[1][2] who became the supervisor for her master's thesis in number theory, Unique Factorization in Bi-Quadratic Number Fields.
She went on to doctoral studies at the University of Mississippi, where she became president of the Graduate Student Council[4] and earned a second master's degree there along the way in 2004.[1][3] She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi in 2006. Her dissertation was supervised by T. James Reid and concerned matroid theory.[5] She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the university,[4] and was part of a group of four African-Americans who all graduated in the same year.[6][7]
Career
After completing her doctorate, Cotwright-Williams worked as a tenure-track faculty member in mathematics at Wake Forest University, Hampton University, and Norfolk State University.[1][8] While working there, in an effort to shift her career to a government track, she began studying public policy and working on collaborative research on Bayesian network based drone control systems with NASA, and on a US Navy project involving measurement uncertainty.[1][4] In 2010, she completed a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy Analysis at Old Dominion University.[3] She applied for an American Mathematical Society Congressional Fellowship, and was turned down on her first application but succeeded in her second, in 2012.[1][4][8]
Cotwright-Williams also became a 2012–2013 Legislative Branch Fellow, under the American Association for the Advancement of Science Science and Technology Policy Fellowship program.[9] She also worked as a science and technology Fellow for both the Senate and the House of Representatives. While a Congressional Fellow she worked as a staffer on the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and her responsibilities included responding to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.[1][4][10] In 2014 she worked on data quality for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and in 2015 she became Hardy-Apfel IT Fellow at the Social Security Administration.[4] Her work at the Social Security Administration has included business analytics to prevent fraud and support data warehousing.[3] In 2018, with the fellowship expiring, she moved again to the United States Department of Defense as a data scientist.[1][11]
Cotwright-Williams continues to hold an adjunct professorial lecturer position in mathematics and statistics at American University.[12] She serves as an at-large member of the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM).[13]
Her career advice includes the following quote: "Get out and talk to people and learn new things!"[14]
Awards and honors
- Outside of Academia Member in the National Association of Mathematicians[10][15]
- Black History Month 2017 Honoree, Mathematically Gifted & Black[16]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Williams, Talithia (2018), "Carla Cotwright-Williams", Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics, Race Point Publishing, pp. 166–171, ISBN 9780760360286, https://books.google.com/books?id=rURaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA166
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Carla Cotwright", Black History Month 2017 Honoree (Mathematically Gifted & Black), http://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/carla-cotwright/, retrieved 2018-11-24
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Carla Cotwright-Williams, Computer Scientist and IT Fellow", SIAM Careers Brochure: Profiles of Professional Mathematicians and Computational Scientists (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), https://www.siam.org/Students-Education/Programs-Initiatives/Thinking-of-a-Career-in-Applied-Mathematics/Profiles/Detail/carla-cotwright-williams-computer-scientist-and-it-fellow, retrieved 2018-11-24
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 "Doctoral Alumna Uses Math for Public Good", Graduate School Newsletter (University of Mississippi), Summer 2017, https://gradschool.olemiss.edu/newsletter-summer-2017/doctoral-alumna-uses-math-for-public-good/, retrieved 2018-11-24
- ↑ Carla Cotwright-Williams at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Farmer, Vernon L.; Shepherd-Wynn, Evelyn; Brevard, Lisa Pertillar (2012), "In His Hands", in Farmer, Vernon L.; Shepherd-Wynn, Evelyn, Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black American Pioneers, Volume 1: Medicine and Science, ABC-CLIO, pp. 3–44, ISBN 9780313392245. See especially p. 40.
- ↑ Banerji, Shilpa (May 12, 2006), "In Historic First, Four African-Americans Earn Math Ph.D.s at Ole Miss", Diverse Issues in Higher Education, https://diverseeducation.com/article/5856/
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Carla D. Cotwright-Williams Chosen as AMS Congressional Fellow, The EDGE Foundation: (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education), May 11, 2012, https://www.edgeforwomen.org/carla-d-cotwright-williams-chosen-as-ams-congressional-fellow/, retrieved 2018-11-24
- ↑ "2019 VSP 20x20: Data Sharing & AI - Carla D Cotwright-Williams". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOvdPHHAoWk.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Carla Cotwright-Williams" (in en). https://prime.natsci.msu.edu/association-summit/speakers/carla-cotwright-williams/.
- ↑ "Boost Your Career in Washington", Notices of the American Mathematical Society 65 (9): 1128–1129, October 2018, https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201809/rnoti-p1128.pdf
- ↑ "Carla Cotwright-Williams", College of Arts & Sciences Faculty (American University), https://www.american.edu/cas/faculty/cotwrigh.cfm, retrieved 2018-11-24
- ↑ "AWM Executive Committee". https://awm-math.org/about/executive-committee/.
- ↑ "Carla Cotwright-Williams | Computer Scientist and IT Fellow". https://www.siam.org/students-education/programs-initiatives/thinking-of-a-career-in-applied-mathematics/profiles/detail/carla-cotwright-williams-computer-scientist-and-it-fellow.
- ↑ "Board of Directors" (in en). https://www.nam-math.org/about-us.html.
- ↑ "Carla Cotwright". https://mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/carla-cotwright/.
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