Wilson named Principal Investigator of NSA center at NC State

Dr. Alyson Wilson, associate professor of statistics, has been named principal investigator of the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences at NC State. The laboratory was created in 2013 through a partnership with the National Security Agency (NSA) to bring together some of the brightest minds from government, academia and industry to address the most challenging big-data problems.

As principal investigator, Wilson will provide technical direction for the LAS research program and promote the innovative university-industry-government collaboration that is fundamental to LAS’s vision. LAS research focuses on the science of big data analytics and intelligence analysis, work that will advance U.S. abilities to collect, understand, and interpret foreign communications, radar, and other electronic systems.

NSA chose NC State for the laboratory partnership due in large part to the university’s national leadership, expertise, and long history in data analysis along with its strong existing partnerships with industry, universities and government agencies.

Wilson, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, is an expert in statistical reliability, Bayesian methods, and the application of statistics to problems in defense and national security. She is also a member of NC State’s Data-Driven Science cluster, which focuses on developing interdisciplinary collaborations between statistics, mathematics, and computer science to develop leadership in data science.

Wilson joined the NC State faculty in 2013. She previously held positions at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute, the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University, and the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.