Colonel William A. Phillips

Dionne L. Price (29 August 1971 - 22 February 2024)^[1] was an American statistician and first African-American president of the American Statistical Association(ASA), the world's largest professional body representing statisticians. Price worked as a division director in the Office of Biostatistics of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in the US Food and Drug Administration.^[2] Her division provided statistical advice "used in the regulation of anti-infective, anti-viral, ophthalmology, and transplant drug products".^[3]

Education and career

Price was African-American^[4], and grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia; her mother was a schoolteacher.^[4] She majored in applied mathematics at Norfolk State University, earned a master's degree from the University of North Carolina,^[4][3] and completed her Ph.D. at Emory University in 2000. Her dissertation, Survival Models for Heterogeneous Populations with Cure, was supervised by Amita Manatunga,^[5] and with it she became the first African-American to earn a doctorate in biostatistics at Emory. After finishing her doctorate, she joined the Food and Drug Administration.^[4]

Recognition

Price was the keynote speaker at StatFest 2016, a one-day conference at Howard University organized by the ASA Committee on Minorities in Statistics to encourage statistical students from underrepresented groups.^[3] She was elected as a Fellow of the ASA in 2018.^[6][7] She was "elected the 118th president of the American Statistical Association (ASA). She served a one-year term as president-elect beginning January 1, 2022; her term as president became effective January 1, 2023. She was elected to the 2022 class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).^[8] Price was the first African-American president of the ASA, serving for a year from 1 January 2023."^[9]

References