Dr. Wilson (WV 1985) says:
I always knew that I liked math, but growing up, I didn’t know how to make it a career. As an undergraduate, I changed majors (at least in my head) about every two weeks, from linguistics to mechanical engineering and everything in between. But I kept taking math courses.

After my junior year, I had a summer internship at Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company, in their Clinical Statistics Department. I was doing what undergraduate interns do – I was counting things (how many women in the study, how many over 30). But others in the group were working on the clinical trial for AZT, which was the first medication to treat HIV. I was hooked. Math – or more specifically statistics – could help solve real-world problems.

So I decided on graduate school in statistics. First a MS at Carnegie Mellon, then work at the National Institutes of Health, and then a PhD at Duke. Family took me to southern New Mexico, where I got my first experience in defense work at Cowboy Programming Resources, a five-person company that supported operational evaluation for the Army. The Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory brought me back to research and introduced me to the fun of working on big science with interdisciplinary teams.

I transitioned to academia in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University, and then got a taste of data supporting policy at the Institute for Defense Analyses, Science and Technology Policy Institute. At NC State, I am putting this all together. As the PI for the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, I get to bring the “national lab” feel of mission-driven problems and interdisciplinary teams to the university. And as AVC, I am helping to enable and build research in defense and security and data science, while expanding our partnerships with the national laboratories.
https://alysongwilson.github.io/