Alanna Connors

Alanna Connors (1956–2013) was a Hong Kong-born American astronomer and statistician known for her introduction and advocacy of Bayesian statistics in high-energy astronomy, and for her early use of the Python programming language in astronomy.[1]

Alanna Connors

Connors was the daughter of an airplane pilot for Pan Am; she was born in Hong Kong, where her father was based,[2] on September 25 1956. She moved to Greenwich, Connecticut as a child. She majored in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1978, and completed a Ph.D. in astronomy and physics in 1988 at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her doctoral research, conducted at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, concerned X-ray transients. Her later career included work as a researcher at the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center and as visiting faculty at Wellesley College, working with data from the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.[1]

She was a founder of the California-Harvard Astrostatistics Collaboration (CHASC), in 1997, and through it she became "a driving force of CHASC’s education mission and outreach effort, helping statisticians understand science and scientists understand statistics".[3]

She died of breast cancer on February 2, 2013.[1][2][3]