Suzanne Thornton

Suzy (Suzanne) Thornton completed a B.S. in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Statistics at Rutgers in 2019. In 2020 she chaired an ASA presidential working group on LGBTQ+ representation and inclusion in the discipline. In 2022 she was appointed to a three year term to serve on the National Advisory Committee for the US Census. She understands statistics as a language of science and her scholarship aims to promote stewardship of the discipline.

Why is stewardship important?

This section will be longer someday but for now, let me share with you the toughts of someone else on what they call cargo-cult statistics. More generally, stewardship is concerned with maintaining the integrity of a discipline (see this artile on stewardship, for example.) Many professional societies have weighed in on what it means to be an ethical (and implicitly stewardly) statistican (or statistical practitioner. Here are two of what I consider to be the most prominent guildelines.

• American Statistical Association Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice
• International Statistical Institute Declaration on Professional Ethics (2010)