Careers in the Mathematical Sciences
Mathematics and statistics are core technologies for modern societies. Mathematicians and statisticians find employment in all areas of industry, business, and government. They may have job titles as varied as Actuarial Scientist, Biostatistician, Business Analyst, Cryptologist, Financial Engineer, Market Strategy Analyst, Operations Research Analyst, Research Statistician, or Systems Engineer, and work on problems as diverse as airport scheduling, circuit design, design of clinical trials, marketing surveys, measurements of air quality, prediction of groundwater flow, optimization of stock portfolios, and quality control in a chip manufacturing plant.
Training in a mathematical science is versatile and has a long "shelf life". Many positions list graduate training in mathematics or statistics as a possible qualification. At the same time, more and more areas of applications are beginning to use mathematical and statistical methods. New methods of data collection necessitate the development and the use of new quantitative tools, and computational power is growing rapidly, requiring the development of new algorithms. For example, modern methods of weather forecasting, recent and ongoing work on genomes of humans, animals, and plants, digital media standards such as jpeg, the technology behind secure web transactions, recent breakthrough results on cancer detection and cancer prediction, are based on mathematical and statistical innovations that were developed in the last decades.
The Washington area is home to a range of industries that value advanced mathematical and statistical training. These include homeland security and defense in Northern Virginia, consumer finance and home mortgage markets in Northern Virginia and the District, and biotechnology in suburban Maryland. In addition, there are many government agencies and laboratories that have needs for technical staff with quantitative skills, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and others.
More information on careers in the mathematical sciences may be found on the career websites of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and of the American Statistical Association (ASA).
