Introduction
Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams (born November 6, 1973) is an African-American mathematician who works as a data scientist for the US government.
Early life and education
Cotwright-Williams is the daughter of a police officer. She grew up in South Central Los Angeles, moving to a better neighborhood in Los Angeles as a teenager. She went to Westchester High School and attended summer enrichment programs for minority students there that included courses at the University of California, Los Angeles and a field trip to see the Space Shuttle at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base. She graduated in 1991.
She struggled as an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach, starting in engineering and earning low enough grades to be dismissed from the program, but returning and eventually earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2000. She then earned a master's degrees in mathematics from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2002. Initially intending to follow a teaching track, she was persuaded to shift to pure mathematics under the mentorship of an African-American professor, Stella R. Ashford, who became the supervisor for her master's thesis in number theory, Unique Factorization in Bi-Quadratic Number Fields.
She went on to doctoral studies at the University of Mississippi, where she became president of the Graduate Student Council and earned a second master's degree there along the way in 2004. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi in 2006. Her dissertation concerned matroid theory; it was Clones and Minors in Matroids, with T. James Reid as her doctoral advisor. She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the university, and was part of a group of four African-Americans who all graduated in the same year.
Career
After completing her doctorate, Cotwright-Williams worked as a tenure-track faculty member in mathematics at Wake Forest University, Hampton University, and Norfolk State University. While working there, in an effort to shift her career to a government track, she began studying public policy and working on collaborative research on Bayesian network based drone control systems with NASA, and on a US Navy project involving measurement uncertainty. In 2010, she completed a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy Analysis at Old Dominion University. She applied for an American Mathematical Society Congressional Fellowship, and was turned down on her first application but succeeded in her second, in 2012.
Her work as a Congressional Fellow included responding to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. In 2014 she worked on data quality for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and in 2015 she became Hardy-Apfel IT Fellow at the Social Security Administration. Her work at the Social Security Administration has included business analytics to prevent fraud and support data warehousing. In 2018, with the fellowship expiring, she moved again to the United States Department of Defense as a data scientist.
She continues to hold an adjunct professorial lecturer position in mathematics and statistics at American University.