The Kentucky State University director of the Atwood Institute for Race, Education, and the Democratic Ideal recently received the HBCU Educators award from SAS Software.
Dr. Anthony Troy Adams was honored during the virtual SAS Global Forum.
“Naturally, I was ecstatic to learn about my selection to participate in SAS Global Forum,” Adams said. “The convening pulls together statisticians, big data analysts, research methodologists, programmers, coders, and academic and industry leaders from around the globe. I was honored to be selected, and to represent Kentucky State University at this comprehensive assembly of individuals using analytics to solve ‘real’ problems.”
Adams said he was introduced to the power of statistics and telling stories using numbers over the course of his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“These experiences culminated in a quantitative analysis of school violence,” Adams said. “I examined the covariates of school violence (using suspension data as a proxy) neighborhood characteristics, school-level features, and serious crime. Subsequently, I went on to teach social statistics for over three decades.”
Adams said his directorship at the Atwood Institute provides a platform for revisiting the literature on disproportionality in school discipline, which is a national problem.
“For example, Black students are significantly more likely to be suspended and expelled from our nation’s schools,” Adams said. “Black students (K-12) are also more likely to travel through the school to prison pipeline.”
Adams said the intensive two-and-a-half day SAS Global Forum was an opportunity for him to move beyond linear regression and analysis of variance analytic techniques.
“The SAS Global Forum provided an opportunity to explore and learn more about hierarchical linear and nested analytic models using SAS (Statistical Analysis System),” Adams said.