Linda Williams Pickle A&S ’74

Linda Williams Pickle is a statistician specializing in Spatial Analysis and Data Visualization, especially as applied to disease patterns. She attended Harford Community College and then transferred to Johns Hopkins University where she majored in Quantitative Studies. She graduated in the first co-educational class in 1974 with honors (Phi Beta Kappa) and then completed a Ph.D. in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins.

Pickle worked as a Researcher and Biostatistician for the National Cancer Institute, analyzing environmental epidemiology studies and producing the second generation of NCI cancer atlases that included modeled time trend maps and then served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Research Associate Professor of Community and Family Medicine at Georgetown University, where she directed the Biostatistics Unit of the Vincent T. Lombardi Cancer Research Center. She later served as Adjunct Professor of Geography and Public Health Services at Pennsylvania State University.

She was a Mathematical Statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics from 1991 to 1999, where she was Project Director for the Center's Atlas of United States Mortality Project which included cognitive research into how people read data from maps. Pickle returned to the National Cancer Institute as a Senior Mathematical Statistician from 1999 to 2007, where she started their Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Program and developed statistical models to examine spatial patterns of cancer. Her model to predict the number of new cancer cases is still used by the American Cancer Society for their Annual Cancer Report. She retired from NCI in 2007 to become Owner and Chief Statistician of a consulting firm, StatNet Consulting.

Pickle is lead author of 3 US Cancer Atlases and has published over 150 articles and numerous book chapters in Medical and Statistical Literature; her work has been cited over 12,000 times. She received the International Blue Pencil Award for Best Illustrated Book in 1997 from the National Association of Government Communicators, a CDC Health Communications Award, the Elijah White Memorial Award from the National Center for Health Statistics, and the ESRI Vision Award for her pioneering work applying GIS to health. She is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association.