Carla Cotwright-Williams

Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams (born November 6, 1973) is an American mathematician who works as a Senior Data Scientist for the US government.[1]

Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams
Born	(1973-11-06) 6 November 1973
Alma mater	University of Mississippi
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematician
Institutions	Department of Defense American University
Doctoral advisor	T. James Reid

Early life and education

Cotwright-Williams is the daughter of a police officer. She 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.[3]

She struggled as an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach, starting in engineering. As a math major, she struggled initially and earning 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 degrees in mathematics from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2002.[1][4] 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, Dr. Stella R. Ashford,[1][2] who became the supervisor for her master's thesis in number theory, Unique Factorization in Bi-Quadratic Number Fields.[3]

She went on to doctoral studies at the University of Mississippi, where she became president of the Graduate Student Council[5] and earned a second master's degree there along the way in 2004.[1][4] She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi in 2006. Her dissertation concerned matroid theory; it was Clones and Minors in Matroids, with T. James Reid as her doctoral advisor.[6] She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the university,[5] and was part of a group of four African-Americans who all graduated in the same year.[7][8]

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][9] 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][5] In 2010, she completed a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy Analysis at Old Dominion University.[4] 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][5][9]

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][5][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.[5] Her work at the Social Security Administration has included business analytics to prevent fraud and support data warehousing.[4] 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 is the Outside of Academia Member in the National Association of Mathematicians.[10][13] Her work has earned her recognition by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.[14]

References

1. Williams, Talithia (2018), "Carla Cotwright-Williams", Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics, Race Point Publishing, pp. 166–171, ISBN 9780760360286
2. "Carla Cotwright", Black History Month 2017 Honoree, Mathematically Gifted & Black, retrieved 2018-11-24
3. "Carla Cotwright, Class of 1991", Distinguished Alumni, Westchester High School, retrieved 2018-11-24
4. "Carla Cotwright-Williams, Computer Scientist and IT Fellow", SIAM Careers Brochure: Profiles of Professional Mathematicians and Computational Scientists, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, retrieved 2018-11-24
5. "Doctoral Alumna Uses Math for Public Good", Graduate School Newsletter, University of Mississippi, Summer 2017, retrieved 2018-11-24
6. Carla Cotwright-Williams at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
7. Farmer, Vernon L.; Shepherd-Wynn, Evelyn; Brevard, Lisa Pertillar (2012), "In His Hands", in Farmer, Vernon L.; Shepherd-Wynn, Evelyn (eds.), Voices of Historical and Contemporary Black American Pioneers, Volume 1: Medicine and Science, ABC-CLIO, pp. 3–44, ISBN 9780313392245. See especially p. 40.
8. Banerji, Shilpa (May 12, 2006), "In Historic First, Four African-Americans Earn Math Ph.D.s at Ole Miss", Diverse Issues in Higher Education
9. Carla D. Cotwright-Williams Chosen as AMS Congressional Fellow, The EDGE Foundation: (Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education), May 11, 2012, retrieved 2018-11-24
10. "Carla Cotwright-Williams". prime.natsci.msu.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
11. "Boost Your Career in Washington" (PDF), Inside the AMS: Announcements from the AMS Office of Government Relations, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 65 (9): 1128–1129, October 2018
12. "Carla Cotwright-Williams", College of Arts & Sciences Faculty, American University, retrieved 2018-11-24
13. "Board of Directors". www.nam-math.org. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
14. "Carla Cotwright". Mathematically Gifted & Black.