Alumni Achievement Award recipient

Amanda Cox of the Class of 2001 is the data editor for the New York Times. She uses her statistical expertise and rigor, programming skills, and artistry to leverage and present data in reader-friendly formats, such as charts, graphs, and interactive news.

Cox earned a B.A. degree in mathematics and statistics at St. Olaf and was the humor-page editor for the student newspaper, the Manitou Messenger. After earning a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Washington and interning with the graphics department at the Times, Cox was hired as one of the paper’s graphics editors. In 2014, she began working for The Upshot, the Time’s website featuring articles that combine data visualization with conventional journalistic analysis. She was named data editor in 2019, coordinating data work across departments and serving as an adviser on questions about the usage and presentation of data.

Cox’s work has been recognized in the field of data visualization. She is regularly cited in academic papers and received the Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association in 2012. The following year, she gave the keynote address at the inaugural meeting of OpenVis, a conference on open-source data visualization tools and techniques, and spoke again at OpenVis in 2017 and 2018. She has a conference room named in her honor at Google headquarters.