Gertrude Mary Cox

Gertrude Mary Cox was born on January 13, 1900, in Dayton, Iowa. After graduating from Perry High School in 1918, she initially aimed to become a deaconess in the Methodist Church. In 1925, she shifted course and enrolled at Iowa State College (later Iowa State University), where she earned a B.S. in 1929 and a master's degree in statistics in 1931. She then spent two years at the University of California, Berkeley, studying psychological statistics before returning to Iowa State to help set up its new Statistical Laboratory, focusing on experimental design.

In 1939, Cox became an assistant professor of statistics at Iowa State. The following year, she moved to North Carolina State College (now North Carolina State University) as a professor of statistics, where she founded and headed the Department of Experimental Statistics—the first woman to lead any department at that institution. By 1945, she was also directing the Institute of Statistics for the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research Division at North Carolina State College, then run by William Gemmell Cochran. That same year, she began a ten-year editorial tenure: she served as editor of *Biometrics Bulletin* from 1945 to 1947, and when it was renamed *Biometrics* in 1947, she continued as its editor until 1955. When Ronald Fisher founded the International Biometric Society in 1947, Cox was among its founding members.

Her most significant research was in experimental design. In 1950, she co-authored *Experimental Designs* with William Cochran, which became the standard reference for statisticians in the field for many years.

Cox took her final academic post in 1960 as Director of Statistics at the Research Triangle Institute in Durham, North Carolina, retiring in 1965. After retirement, she consulted to help build statistical programs in Egypt and Thailand.

She earned numerous honors. In 1949, she became the first woman elected to the International Statistical Institute. She served as President of the American Statistical Association in 1956 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. She was also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The University of North Carolina system gave her the O. Max Gardner Award in 1959. North Carolina State University named Cox Hall in her honor in 1970 and awarded her the Watauga Medal in 1977.