Speakers

Dr. Milbury is the former Vice President & Senior Analytics Manager at Bank of Hawaii. She started in banking in 2017 as a Quantitative Analyst at First Hawaiian Bank, then was promoted and started building and leading teams after a year or so. 

In her prior academic career, she earned a BS in Physics (minor in Astrophysics) from UC Santa Cruz, and PhD in Planetary Physics from UCLA. She was awarded a graduate fellowship through NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and her dissertation was on Mars’ paleomagnetic fields. Subsequently, she did a postdoc in France at Université de Nantes in the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique furthering her graduate research. Her next postdoc was at Purdue University on the science team of NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Internal Laboratory (GRAIL) mission using a shock physics hydrocode to model hypervelocity impact cratering on the Moon, as well as investigating lunar lava tubes and buried impact craters. She was an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Engineering Department at West Virginia Wesleyan College for a year before leaving academia and research.

She has been interviewed by Sky and Telescope Magazine, Hawaii Technology Development Corporation as part of their Women in Tech Series, and served on two local panels (Honolulu and Blacksburg) for the global Women in Data Science conference organized by Stanford University. Her research projects have been reported on by National Geographic, BBC, AP, Space.com, and other global news organizations.

D. Sarah Stamps is an associate professor of geophysics in the Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences specializing in geodesy and tectonophysics. She and her research group members produce and use GNSS positioning data to observe how the Earth’s surface moves. They also use computational modeling to elucidate the physical processes driving the Earth’s surface motions. The data analysis and computational modeling aspects of her research program have applications in volcanic, seismic, and coastal hazards, as well as the plate tectonic theory. Her study areas include Tanzania, Uganda, Madagascar, Malawi, China, the East African Rift System, and the Chesapeake Bay, USA. She graduated from Purdue University with her PhD in 2013 and did her postdoctoral studies at MIT and the University of California Los Angeles. She has been awarded numerous awards from the US government, including the NSF CAREER award and the NSF EarthCube award for Outstanding Service and Leadership. 

Genevieve is an experienced collaborative biostatistician at the University of Virginia. She provides statistical support and consulting on research projects with collaborators in the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and others. Her research interests include maternal and child health, cardiology, cystic fibrosis, nephrology, secondary data analysis, and social determinants of health. Other professional interests include data visualization and science communication. She is the manager of the Research Methods core for the iTHRIV CTSA and a biostatistics mentor for the CUBE (Collaborative Undergraduate Biostatistics Experience) program. Genevieve especially enjoys working with students on biostatistics and statistical programming. 

Ashley Ballard, CCM, is CEO and Lead Atmospheric Data Scientist at Adiabat, LLC, a woman-owned weather technology and consulting firm based in Roanoke, VA. At Adiabat she leads a team of meteorologists, data scientists, and GIS specialists to solve industry-specific problems around weather and climate. She has extensive experience providing global impact-based weather analysis using programmatic data acquisition and geospatial analytics to the U.S. Intelligence Community and Army Corps of Engineers.

Mrs. Ballard is an American Meteorological Society (AMS) board-certified consulting meteorologist (CCM) and holds her BS in Meteorology, BA in Geography, and MS in Geography from Virginia Tech. Mrs. Ballard volunteers her time as a member of the National Weather Association's (NWA) Membership and Marketing Committee. Through Adiabat, Ashley has supported several Computational Modeling and Data Analytics (CMDA) capstone projects at Virginia Tech. She has previous experience as a freelance weather contributor at the Arizona Daily Star, a GIS-consultant to the National Weather Service (NWS) in Tucson, Arizona, and a software developer at Meteorological Connections (METCON).

Alicia Arneson is a PhD student in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. She has 2 years of collaborative statistics experience from working with the Statistical Applications and Innovations Group (SAIG) and the Center for Biostatistics and Health Data Science (CBHDS) at VT. She has led several short courses in the past, including three short courses on using the ADEPT framework to explain complex concepts to audiences who are unfamiliar with the subject matter. Alicia enjoys ‘bridging the gap’ between statistical concepts and her clients’ respective disciplines. She is especially excited about helping other graduate students navigate their statistical analyses and communicate their findings clearly and accurately.

Dr. Langwig is an infectious disease ecologist. Her research program at Virginia Tech focuses on the role of host-pathogen interactions in population dynamics and community structure. As part of this research, she explores how variation among hosts influences epidemiological dynamics, population impacts, and effectiveness of disease interventions. In relation to global change, Dr. Langwig studies the impact of infectious disease on ecological communities, the importance of disease in determining species extinctions, and the long-term persistence of populations affected by disease in human-altered landscapes. She uses a combination of field data, historical population datasets, and modelling approaches to help inform conservation responses to preserve disease-imperiled species.

Dr. Langwig’s interests span the disease-policy interface, and her work has been integral in shaping management responses to wildlife disease. She has served as invited member for determining species at risk of endangerment and extinction for both the U.S. and Canada, and she serves on several working groups to promote conservation of disease-affected species.