Melinda Higgins is co-founder of R-Ladies Atlanta and current (2020-2022) Vice Chair of District 5 for the American Statistical Association Council of Chapters. She is also the author/creator of two online courses: R for SAS Users and Reproducible Templates for Analysis and Dissemination. She is a senior biostatistician and research professor in the Office of Nursing Research - School of Nursing - Emory University in Atlanta, GA (2007-current). She is the author and teacher of two PhD level courses at Emory: Quantitative Analysis of Clinical Data every Fall semester and Big Data Analytics for Healthcare every Spring semester. Prior to that she was a Principal Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (1996-2011) and Program Manager for the $17M National Guard Bureau Technology Consortium.
She has over 25+ years experience performing and managing research in wide-ranging applications including healthcare bio-behavioral phenotype characterization and modeling, statistical support for clinical trials, aircraft sensor systems, remote sensing, multispectral/hyperspectral processing, signatures intelligence, knowledge decision support systems, geospatial information systems, sensors and image fusion, and target recognition.