Statistics professor receives national award

By Mark Muckenfuss

Even as a kid, Alana Unfried was fascinated with organizing things based on numbers. 

“My parents have this picture of me with my penny collection,” the Cal State Monterey Bay statistics professor said. “I would organize them all by date and put them in columns.”

By her final year of high school, she knew she wanted to pursue a degree in math. She did so at Point Loma Nazarene before earning a doctorate in statistics at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. 

In August, 10 years after coming to CSUMB, Unfried was honored with the Waller Early Career Education Award presented by the American Statistical Association at its annual conference. 

Unfried’s award was based upon her “exceptional innovation in assessing student and instructor attitudes toward statistics and data science, for shaping the national dialogue on introductory statistics and data science through leadership in professional organizations, and for sustained excellence and creativity in the classroom,” according to department chair Judith Canner. 

Unfried said she believes her work in creating a website with tools allowing researchers to analyze and share their data was a primary factor in her award.

“When you see educational research,” Unfried said, “a lot of the studies are about one thing one institution did at one school. It’s harder to look at what’s happening nationally, what’s working and what the current state of things is.”

Researchers, she said, get access to the website tools “and we get to keep all the data so we can start to see what’s going on nationwide. We can improve statistics and data science education, and this is laying the foundation for that work.

“I know that was the No. 1 reason the award was given,” she added. 

Canner called Unfried’s award a “tremendous national honor.”

“Dr. Unfried's achievement puts CSUMB on the map as a university where students learn directly from world-class faculty that care deeply about their education and learning,” Canner said. “The award ... demonstrates that the innovative work happening in our classrooms isn't just impactful locally, but is shaping how the field is taught across the country.”  

That potential for broader impact is one of the original reasons Unfried became interested in statistical work. 

“The part that attracted me about numbers was the applied aspect and using data in the real world,” she said. 

Many people, Unfried said, are unaware of how statistics affect their daily lives. But we live in a world of numbers, particularly when it comes to such things as artificial intelligence. 

“So much of it is statistical algorithms,” she said. “We are overflowing with data. It can be really hard to grasp the important pieces of that. For me, statistics is a way of making sense of the world, to find truth in the world.”

A large part of her focus is on changing students’ perceptions of the numeric world that surrounds them.

“What’s exciting to me is when they can see how this applies to their own work,” she said. “It completely blows open their view of their own data and what they can learn from it.”

Ultimately, she said, that knowledge is passed on.

“My goal for students is not just their own learning,” she said, “but that they have the ability to help other people interpret what they’re hearing.” 

Information about the statistics and data science major is available on its webpage.