Sharina Person

Sharina Delores Person is an American biostatistician known for developing and directing the Diversity Engagement Survey of the Association of American Medical Colleges. She is a professor in the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, vice chair of the university's Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, and Dr. Marcellette G. Williams Senior Scholar.

Education and career

Person is African-American, and grew up with non-college-educated parents in a low-income and low-education neighborhood in Gary, Indiana. She majored in mathematics and physics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, continuing there for a master's degree and Ph.D. in biostatistics. Her 1998 doctoral dissertation, The estimation and forecasting of incomplete stationary time series, was supervised by J. Michael Hardin.

She became a faculty member at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before moving to the University of Massachusetts.

Recognition

In 2024 the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School gave Person their Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion. She was named as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2026.