Susan J. Devlin

Summary

My professional career, first at AT&T Bell Laboratories and then at Bellcore after the breakup of the “Bell System” in 1984, has had two distinctly different phases. Both heavily utilize my graduate training in statistics.

When I completed my degree in mathematics in 1968, I knew I wanted graduate training in a mathematical science, but I felt ill-equipped to choose a specialty. Thus I went to work for AT&T Bell Laboratories as a senior technical assistant in the statistics and data analysis research lab, which offered exposure to applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Bell Laboratories offered the opportunity to work with researchers in methodology development and participate in diverse applications. Going to school part-time, I completed an MS in Statistics and all course work and exams for a PhD.

The 17 1/2 years I spent in statistics research were exciting and filled with opportunities for professional growth. I did basic research with diverse teams of statisticians and occasionally with other scientists, published over 20 papers, and prepared numerous internal technical reports, covering such areas as demand analysis, regression diagnostics, robust estimation, seasonal adjustment of time series, and multivariate smoothing. I also consulted on interesting studies, such as predicting telephone demand and price elasticities, optimizing the selection of cities for expanding video conferencing, and modeling the fading of radio signals based on weather and geographic characteristics. I embedded some of our developments into corporate statistical training and lectured at our corporate training center.