ASA Connect

The Boston Chapter of the ASA is delighted to recognize Dr. Kylie Bemis with the 2023 Outstanding Teaching Award. 

Date: 6:00 – 8:00pm (ET), January 31, 2024

Location: Northeastern University 102 lab, West Village Residence Complex H, 440 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115

Registration

Honoree and Speaker: Dr. Kylie Bemis, Assistant Teaching Professor at Northeastern University

Presentation Title: Outliers, Life in the Tails, and the Statistics We Don't Plot

Abstract: At the end of 2016, to the best of my knowledge, I became the first Native American to earn a PhD in Statistics. In that same year, I came out as a trans woman. Statisticians have long understood that how we handle outliers, missing values, and sampling bias can have a dramatic impact on outcomes. The same is true in teaching and society at large. As we train the next generation of statisticians and data scientists, it is vital that our students see themselves reflected in their work, and that they understand the social responsibility of analyzing and interpreting data for a diverse world. I will share what I have learned about teaching as a statistician who has rarely seen herself reflected as a category in a bar plot, and what it means to be a statistic.

Bio: Kylie Bemis is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She holds a B.S. degree in Statistics and Mathematics, a M.S. degree in Applied Statistics, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Purdue University. In 2013, she interned at the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection, where she developed the Cardinal software package for statistical analysis of mass spectrometry imaging experiments. In 2015, she was awarded the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award by the American Statistical Association for her work on Cardinal. In 2016, she joined the Olga Vitek lab for Statistical Methods for Studies of Biomolecular Systems at Northeastern University as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2019, she joined Northeastern as faculty, where she now teaches data science and develops curriculum for the M.S. in Data Science program. Her research interests include machine learning and large-scale statistical computing for bioinformatics.

While at Purdue University, Kylie Bemis served as president of the Purdue chapter of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and secretary of the Native American Student Association (NASA). She is active in outreach to the Native American and LGBTQ communities. She is an enrolled member of the Zuni tribe, and she is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color (2018), Maiden Mother Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes (2019), and Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction (2019).

About the Award: The Boston Chapter's Outstanding Teaching Award recognizes faculty members who have made exceptional contributions to statistics and data science education.