Washington, Talitha

Impact on the world

A leader in expanding both pure-mathematics access and data science capacity at historically Black institutions, Washington became, in 2001, the first African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Connecticut, and went on to direct the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative — coordinating curriculum and research across Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College — before leading the NSF-funded National Data Science Alliance as principal investigator and helping build the agency's first Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program. In 2023 she became the 26th president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and in 2021 became the first person ever named a Fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the Association for Women in Mathematics in the same year.

Life & background

Born Talitha M. Wangerin on January 9, 1974, in Frankfort, Indiana, and adopted young by Ruthanne and Walter Wangerin, she was raised in Evansville, Indiana — the same city, she later noted, where pioneering mathematician Elbert Frank Cox, already profiled in this collection, was born — and graduated from Benjamin Bosse High School after a year abroad in Costa Rica. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Spelman College, including a semester in Guadalajara, Mexico, then completed a master's and PhD in mathematics at the University of Connecticut in 2001, becoming the first African American to do so there. She held a VIGRE research associateship at Duke University and assistant professorships at the College of New Rochelle and the University of Evansville before joining Howard University, where she became associate professor and later held the Sean McCleese Endowed Chair in Computer Science, Race, and Social Justice as Executive Director of the Center for Applied Data Science & Analytics; she also held a full professorship at Clark Atlanta University. Her research applies differential equations and nonstandard finite-difference schemes — developed in long collaboration with mentor Ronald E. Mickens, already profiled in this collection — to problems in biology and engineering. She received the 2019 Black Engineer of the Year STEM Innovator Award and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.

Sources

1. MacTutor History of Mathematics; Howard University faculty profile; SIAM; Infinite Women; Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative