Dr. Talitha Washington

Dr. Talitha Washington is the inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) Data Science Initiative, a Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University and an affiliate faculty at Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College. She is the Director and lead principal investigator of the NSF-funded National Data Science Alliance (NDSA) and the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She works across Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to increase the number of Blacks with expertise in data science and expand data science research that advocates for social justice. 

Dr. Washington is a former Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) who worked in the Convergence Accelerator which is now in the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP). Previously, as a Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education, she was instrumental in building and establishing NSF’s first Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program which funded $40,000,000 in awards in FY19.

She was elected to honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, and mathematics honor societies Kappa Mu Epsilon and Pi Mu Epsilon. She is the recipient of the 2019 BEYA STEM Innovator Award, the 2019 Outstanding Faculty Award from Howard University, and the 2020 NSF Director’s Award for Superior Accomplishment. She is a Fellow of the African Scientific Institute (ASI), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Dr. Washington completed her undergraduate studies in mathematics at Spelman College and studied abroad at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, Mexico. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Connecticut. She was a VIGRE Research Associate in the Department of Mathematics at Duke University. She held assistant professorships at The College of New Rochelle and the University of Evansville,  an associate professorship at Howard University, and most recently, a full professorship at Clark Atlanta University.

​Dr. Washington is an in-demand speaker who enjoys sharing her expertise on applied mathematics as well as STEM diversity to a wide range of audiences. Her work on Dr. Elbert Frank Cox, the first Black in the world to earn a PhD in mathematics, has been shared on radio and television stations, as well as in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.  Her research interests include the applications of differential equations to problems in biology and engineering, as well as the development of nonstandard finite difference schemes to numerically solve dynamical systems.