Strength in Numbers: Marina Ptukhina Challenges Students To Become Thoughtful Data Analysts

Marina Ptukhina chose to go into academia because she had questions that demanded complex answers. 

“I’m not proud to admit it, but I started my career working on studies that promoted cigarette brands,” says Ptukhina, who is now an Associate Professor of Statistics at Whitman College.

After graduating with a degree in Management from Ukraine’s National Technical University, her first job involved running observational studies on behalf of international tobacco brands looking to break into the Eastern European market. 

For other surveys, Ptukhina spent hours collecting data about corner grocery store consumers, counting how many people came in at a certain time of night to buy cleaning products or how long they spent eyeing different jars of mayonnaise before making their selection. 

“Even though I was working in the marketing sector then, I wanted to know what happened to all the data I was collecting,” she says. 

That question was still on her mind when her brother was accepted into a master’s program in Illinois, which inspired Ptukhina to calculate her own next challenge: graduate work in applied mathematics and statistics.

Plotting Her Own Path 

“I never knew that it was possible for someone like me, without money or personal connections, to be able to go to the U.S. to study,” she says. “My brother opened my mind and became my example. 

Ptukhina grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine, under the Soviet system. She was 11 years old when Ukraine declared independence. 

“The transition was hard financially for everyone I knew,” Ptukhina explains. “My mom worked in a factory, and especially that first year, sometimes she didn’t get paid or would get paid [with] clothing or other goods instead of cash.”

However, public education and university were free, and the required math coursework in high school was extremely technical. Everyone took two years of higher mathematics. 

That made for high scores on Ptukhina’s U.S. graduate school entrance exams and helped her land an offer of admission to a master’s program in mathematics at Texas Tech University. Best of all, it involved funding and an invitation to work as a teaching assistant.

When Ptukhina arrived in Lubbock, Texas, she discovered Walmart, Texas twangs, and an unexpected passion for teaching undergraduate statistics. She also began to envision a meaningful career as an academic.

‘They Can Do It, So I Can Too’

After earning her Master of Science, Ptukhina started a doctoral program in Statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Despite the fact that tenured women in the field are far outnumbered by men, the program had such a strong reputation for producing powerhouse female academics that The Washington Post did a feature on it, interviewing Ptukhina and others. 

“There are so many females, you never feel like you’re alone in a man’s world,” she told the reporter in 2014. “You see other women and think, ‘Oh, they can do it, so I can too.’”

Nebraska’s training program for teaching assistants helped Ptukhina hone her teaching style in a formative way. “They wanted us to become even better educators,” she says. “We were each assigned a mentor who pushed us to find our own unique approaches in the sections and write our own exams.” 

Though Ptukhina had never lived in the Pacific Northwest, when she set foot on Whitman’s campus for her interview in 2016, it felt like coming home. “From the beginning, I felt like my colleagues in the Math Department were incredibly welcoming and collaborative,” she says.

As one of the first statisticians in Whitman’s Mathematics and Statistics Department, Ptukhina carved out a role teaching cornerstone courses, including Introduction to Statistics, Statistical Modeling, and Design and Analysis of Research Studies. 

With the support of her colleagues, she helped establish a minor in Data Science within the Math and Statistics Department in 2019. Then in 2022, the department rolled out a combined Mathematics and Statistics major. 

“Role models have always played a huge role in my life,” Ptukhina says. So she’s proud that the first three students to graduate from the combined major are all women.

Asking the Right Questions

Today, Ptukhina’s focus is on how people interact with data in an increasingly data-driven world. “In all of my classes, my goal is for my students to become thoughtful consumers of information,” she says.

“The way we collect data is crucial, both ethically and in relation to any research question. If students hear about a study on the news or engage with research in their future professional roles, I want them to be able to question whether the researchers carried out the right steps to justify the final conclusion.”

To reach this goal takes a lot of day-to-day practice in class, running simulations, mastering software, and learning how to analyze data and spot its limitations. 

Ptukhina emphasizes that understanding the design of a study is a crucial component for developing and analyzing plausible models. 

In 2024, she and Julie Garai, a peer from her doctoral cohort, co-authored the second edition of “Generalized Linear Mixed Models: Modern Concepts, Methods and Applications” with Walter Stroup (Nebraska Emeritus Professor and former advisor to both Ptukhina and Garai). Building on the first edition written by Stroup in 2012, they expanded the content and increased its accessibility to a broader audience. 

The first edition targeted upper-level graduate students and advanced users of statistics. Recognizing the value of the methods, Ptukhina and Garai adapted them to be accessible to all users, including undergraduates. 

Later this year, they will showcase their innovative approaches in an interactive workshop at the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics at Iowa State University. The concept is to give students the tools needed to not simply master isolated concepts but to go beyond and learn to design studies and nimbly develop clear plans for analyzing models.

“The most rewarding thing is to see students develop independent thinking that allows them to effectively apply the tools they learned in my classes to their areas of interest, whether that’s analyzing data trends, conducting research projects or tackling real-world issues in their fields,” Ptukhina says.