Lorraine Denby
American statistician and Civil Air Patrol pilot
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Lorraine Denby is a retired American statistician, formerly affiliated with Bell Labs and Avaya,[1] and a lieutenant colonel in the Civil Air Patrol.[2]
Education and career
Denby has a 1971 master's degree in statistics from the University of Michigan.[3] She listed her affiliation with Bell Labs on statistics publications with dates ranging from 1976[4] to 1999.[5] During this time, she also completed a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Michigan in 1984, with the dissertation Smooth Regression Functions (Partial Residual Plots) supervised by Edward D. Rothman.[1] By 2002, she was working for Avaya Labs Research;[6] she has subsequently retired.[1][7] In her retirement, she consults as a principal for Murray Hill Data Science.[8]
Professional recognition
Denby was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1991.[9] She was one of three 1997 recipients of the American Statistical Association Founders Award for distinguished service to the association.[10]
In 2014, she was part of a team of three researchers at Avaya that won the Edison Award of the R&D Council of New Jersey, for their patented research on localizing problems in networks carrying multimedia data.[11]
Aviation
As a teenager in Michigan in 1967, Denby was selected to become a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol through a program that chose one participant from each US state for a month of flight training; she was the only girl in the program.[7] She continues to serve in the Civil Air Patrol as a lieutenant colonel, as a flight instructor, as NJ Wing Emergency Services Training Officer, and as a pilot and surrogate target in training exercises.[2][7][8]
In 2020, she was involved in a flight incident while training a student pilot, when their plane clipped a tree and crash-landed.[12] She was part of a three-person team that competed in a one-day women's air derby in 2021, placing seventh.[13] She was both a director of and a competitor in the 2024 Air Race Classic, a transcontinental air race for female pilots.[8] Her personal airplane is a Piper Arrow,[14] and she is also active in the Ninety-Nines, an organization of women pilots.[8][14]