About Us: Classic

Afia O. is a Statistician, Operations Researcher, and an advanced SAS Programmer. She has helped government clients with automating reports by transporting results generated in SAS to fixed Microsoft Excel templates. She led a team of five to produce national reports for a section of the US workforce. Afia has used regression analysis procedures tailored for clustered populations on a baseline study in health insurance and produced healthcare quality measures for government clients. Her data mining work with a commercial client led to a discovery of an important predictive variable and experience in General Linear Modeling. In addition, she has 1.5 years of statistical consulting experience from her work with two for-profit organizations. Her training and experience includes SAS, SUDAAN, STATA, SPSS, MINITAB, MPL, AMPL, R.

Afia loves teaching, and her educational experience has led her to spend her free time organizing meetups for Ghanaian women that will help inspire them to step up to leadership roles. She conducted initial in-depth interviews of women in technology in Ghana; based on their stories, she galvanized a pool of programming resources through the Statistics Without Borders. Afia has recruited more than 20 leadership roles for two separate women-focused movements in two major cities—Accra & Kumasi— in the West African Country; Ghana.

Mikhail is a data visualization, data mining, and Excel modeling specialist. He has helped commercial, non-profit, and government clients gain control over their data through visualization, reporting, and ad hoc analyses. His projects include everything from business intelligence and analytics to systems consolidation.

Recently, most of his time is spent helping clients visualize their data to gain faster, more meaningful insights into their company and make better strategic business decisions. In addition, he trains teams on Tableau, VBA, Advanced Excel, and SQL.

This experience helped him flesh out the three things that he is truly passionate about – Data Analysis, Visualization, and Training/Mentoring. The third piece is what brought him to CWT and why he is a fervent believer in the mission of the organization.

Christina Alva is a lead data analytics developer and supervisor for a large think tank company in the D.C. area. As a supervisor, she assists in the hiring and developing of new recruits.  She is also the CEO of Amazing Books, LLC, and the coauthor of Beyond The Job Description, a book that discusses tips for advancement in the workplace. Aside from work, Christina loves writing, dancing, playing video games, and hanging out with friends and family.

Follow Christina on Instagram @ChristinaNAlva or visit her website to get her top tips on how to succeed in the workplace.

Gary S. has been a survey statistician his entire career, planning and selecting samples for surveys, determining weights for survey units, and estimating variances. The majority of his career was at the U S Census Bureau, where most of his years was as an Assistant Division Chief with responsibilities for all of the household surveys conducted by the Bureau. He then spent 3 years at Abt Associates, followed by 13 years at Westat. At both Abt Associates and Westat, he was responsible for the sample design and other aspects for a number of surveys. In 2008 Gary co-founded Statistics Without Borders and served as the first Chair and Co-Chair. Statistics Without Borders provides entirely pro bono statistical assistance to non-profit organizations and government agencies.  He continues to be active in this group as a committee chair and a member of the Executive Committee.

Maria H. has expertise in using survey data to support social science research and developing software to support health quality care improvement.

Maria contributes to a variety of health and human services projects and is the project director of an initiative to maintain the Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT) for the National Science Foundation. SESTAT is an integrated system of data covering the employment, educational, and demographic characteristics of scientists and engineers in the United States. Maria designed and implemented a major upgrade to SESTAT to facilitate production of documentation, data extracts, and data collection specifications for survey data. She also served as a senior programmer analyst and systems analyst for multiple evaluations of the Medicare Advantage Plan, conducted performance monitoring of the Medicare Health Support Program for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, provided quality assurance and generated annual reports for the Health Care Survey of DoD Beneficiaries, and wrote benchmarking software for the Resource Use Reports project.

Before joining Mathematica in 2006, Hudson was a consultant with IBM Business Consulting Services and a mathematical statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau. She has an M.S. in mathematics from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Dr. Jill M. has over 28 years of experience in developing quantitative analyses to solve a variety of scientific, business and intelligence problems.

Over the past seven years, she has worked with customers in the Treasury Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, leveraging her expertise in nuclear technologies, data fusion, intelligence analysis, and statistical data mining in efforts to combat weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and financial crimes. Prior to that, she led a number of high-impact data mining efforts for government clients in the civil, defense, and intelligence sectors.

Specialties: large-scale analytics, statistical data mining, data fusion, statistical analysis, graph analytics, geospatial analysis, text mining, nuclear detection, quantum information science

SAS, SPSS, S-Plus, R, MARS, CART, MATLAB