Interview Welcoming Senior Lecturer on Statistics Mine Doğucu

The Harvard Department of Statistics is thrilled to share that we have a new faculty member in the Department: Senior Lecturer Mine Doğucu. Prof. Doğucu is a teacher-scholar of statistics and data science. Before arriving at Harvard, she was an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the Department of Statistics, where she was a part of the faculty starting in 2019. 

As an applied statistician with deep experience in teaching and educational research, Prof. Doğucu is a leader in undergraduate education whose impact extends beyond her classroom. At UCI, she was responsible for starting and building up the first research group devoted to statistics education research. To meet her goal of creating statistics and data science curricula that are accessible and nationally relevant, Prof. Doğucu has collaborated on projects for community colleges and K-12 schools and co-authored Bayes Rules! An Introduction to Applied Bayesian Modeling.

To help our community get to know Prof. Doğucu, we sat down with her to discuss where her love of statistics originated, her approach to teaching, and her excitement about joining Harvard Stats. Read our edited and excerpted interview below.

Career Path:

1. What initially ignited your interest in statistics (e.g., a class, experience, mentor, etc.)? 

As an undergraduate math major, I had pretty much taken all my math requirements and was looking for something new, so I decided to take a statistics class that was very similar to Stat 100 (I’m teaching this course this semester!). 

I remember the exact time that I had a “wow” moment in my statistics class. It was after Hurricane Katrina. When our instructor was teaching about probability and categorical variables, she gave us this example of determining the probability of losing your home, given you're Black vs. White. I was so impressed that you can use your knowledge of math to ask questions that are important for human life, such as questions about housing and public health.

2. How did you determine that you wanted to pursue a career path in statistics and data science education?  Can you describe an early teaching or mentoring experience that influenced your decision to pursue this career? 

Surprisingly, I have photos of myself at age 6 teaching my neighborhood friends in my room. Mainly, I think my love of teaching from an early age came from my love of learning; realizing something about the world was just so exciting!  If my teacher taught something new at school, I felt impressed by her knowledge, and then wanted to go back to my neighborhood to teach my friends.

When I was in high school, a private boarding school near Istanbul, Turkey, my interest in teaching grew when I became a teacher's assistant for my math course. My teacher even trusted me to prepare exams for younger classes, which I know sounds insane for a high school student to be entrusted with! However, he did, and I’m grateful I had that opportunity to practice my teaching skills.

Over the years, as I’ve developed experience teaching students something new and evaluating their performance, I have started seeing how education can have a meaningful impact on people's lives. This has made me very passionate about teaching.

Research and Collaboration Highlights:

3. You have held faculty positions at a range of institutions, most recently at the University of California, Irvine.  Can you share a few highlights of your work during this time? 

Anyone who teaches knows that our proudest moments are the ones that don’t even make it onto a CV. The real highlights from my work are when I receive thank-you emails, or hear from an alum who took one stats class with me and is now a data scientist, or learn that a student I taught is now a stats minor or is taking more stats classes. It’s always so inspiring to encourage more students to get into our field!

One initiative that I would highlight is my research group on statistics education that I built up at UCI. It was a flexible group in that students could just do the readings with us, or they could participate in a short-term or year-round project and publish papers with me. While many stats departments see the value in good teaching practices, it is quite rare to find formal research groups focused on statistics education. After seeing my students from the group become professors and go into teaching-focused careers, it made everything come full circle and felt very rewarding.

Teaching and Mentoring:

4. What are the main components of your current teaching philosophy and pedagogical priorities? Can you provide a few examples of how you’ve implemented them? 

My main belief that shapes my classroom is that everyone can learn. This belief is reflected in my classroom when I read the faces in the room and then adapt the pace of the material. I try to be encouraging by showing that there's nothing wrong about going slowly; if it takes 10 times to understand something, it takes 10 times to understand it. When my students raise questions, they often say things like, “I have a stupid question,” so I let them know that the rule in our classroom is that there are no stupid questions because it's always good to be curious.

Another idea that shapes my classroom is that statistics is very useful and relevant for everyone. It’s a part of your civic education to learn about how to understand election data, for example, and it’s a part of your personal well-being to understand how to read medical tests. In my classroom, I always select datasets that are interesting to a 19-year-old and can connect with their lives as adults. For instance, in my first lecture in Stat 100, the dataset I use is from the Harvard Art Museums—a place that I hope they will visit during their time at Harvard.

Finally, for me, learning is a social event. Learning in isolation is very miserable, and much more difficult, so I make my classes very social. For example, I teach students a concept, and then the students must explain the topic to their neighbor. This social interaction with and teaching of their neighbor is also designed to help students with their own understanding of the concept.

5. What motivates you to scale teaching best practices and to get involved in national and international organizations and initiatives focused on statistical education? 

My teaching practices initially start from my own classroom. For instance, my TAs and I developed a grading tool to improve the process for students in our own classroom that we distributed more broadly. When the tool is useful for me and for my students’ learning, then I feel like I can’t just keep it to myself! When other educators in the US or around the world use my teaching practices, it motivates me to do even better work. Teaching is a very difficult task, so if I can contribute to making teachers’ work easier, I’m thrilled to be able to continue doing this.

A statistical education initiative that I have led in conjunction with the American Statistical Association is International Data Quest, an event for teams of undergraduate and master’s students to work with and hack data for a month. The event has expanded to multiple countries, including Colombia, Mexico, and Nigeria. It brings me so much joy that students around the world are having fun working with data. As long as I have the time and energy to do it, I’ll do things like International Data Quest all my life! 

6. You have taken on leadership positions for many different education outreach initiatives and conferences, including co-chairing the Undergraduate Statistics Project Competition and the Electronic Undergraduate Statistics Research Conference and being the PI on the grant for the Irvine Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Data Science.  Why have you taken on these leadership roles and why do you think these types of programs are important? 

I am so grateful that NIH has funded the Irvine Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Data Science across the country for many years. First, the program, which provides 6-7 weeks of courses and hands-on research on biostatistics and principles of data science, is an opportunity for students who may not have the means to participate in such a program. These students may not come from scientific families, or they may not be students from institutions with the resources to give them exposure to biostatistics research.

Both the undergraduate statistics conferences and summer research programs are very good at building students' identity and sense of belonging as a statistician. Although students might not start calling themselves statisticians while they’re in school, these events expose them to working on world-class research projects. Once students start talking to professional researchers and working with them, they start feeling like they belong in the room.

Harvard Community:

7. In your new position at Harvard, what are you looking forward to the most?  What are you energized about? 

I'm teaching Stat 100, both in fall and spring, so obviously I'm most excited about that course!  I would like this course to become the gateway course to encourage students to take more stats courses, even if they don’t become a concentrator.  I’m excited about having students at Harvard with such a wide range of academic interests because statistics is relevant to all concentrations. This is why we focus on data from the Harvard Art Museums the first week of Stat 100 and then look at economics and psychology data, for example.

My hope is to be a part of building a research community and culture here of seeing statistics education research as discipline-specific and integral to the field and professional organizations like the American Statistical Association. Related to this, I’m co-teaching Stat 303 [The Art and Practice of Teaching Statistics] with Joe Blitzstein in the spring, and I’m looking forward to having conversations with students in this course about teaching and statistics education.

In terms of getting involved in the community, I’m looking forward to launching a monthly arts outing for the Department with James Xenakis to go to the Harvard Art Museums or a film.

8. What’s a fun fact about you that you’d like to share with students, faculty, researchers, and staff in the department? 

I can share three! First, Boston Logan International Airport was my port of entry into the U.S. in 2005, because I did my undergrad at Smith College in Western Massachusetts. My other fun fact is that I lived in Asia while working in Europe (and vice versa); this is because Istanbul is on both continents! Lastly, before moving to the Cambridge area, I lived in the heart of Hollywood (I did not get to go to the Oscars, unfortunately!).

To learn more about Prof. Doğucu and to hear about her first day of class in Stat 100, please take a look at this recent Harvard FAS Current article.