Florence Nightingale David (1909-1993) is a celebrated role model in the field of statistics. To honor her, an international group of statistical association presidents established the F. N. David Lectureship in 2018. This was the first lectureship at the Joint Statistical Meetings named after a woman. Our talk will focus on David’s rise to outstanding significance in the statistics profession while she worked in the United Kingdom at University College London (1933-1968), and after she emigrated to the United States in 1968 to become the founding chair of the statistics department at the University of California – Riverside. In this talk, we will discuss how a woman statistician can reach a glass ceiling and smash it – twice and on two continents.
