May 27, 2016

Amy Richardson takes a break at her workplace. (Contributed photo)

Amy Richardson takes a break at her workplace. (Contributed photo)

Public health led Amy Richardson, PhD, to Google.

It wasn’t her expected career path, but the 2014 alumna of the Gillings School’s biostatistics department landed a job after an internship with the technology giant during the final year of her doctoral program.

As a quantitative analyst in Google’s offices in Mountain View, Calif., Amy has a unique work environment. Her typical day involves a few hours of writing and testing code changes and updates to forecasting software, a few hours of data analysis to support decisions about back-end search algorithms and — naturally — a quick break to play a round of pool or an arcade game.

“I’d always believed Google had a positive impact on the world,” Richardson says. “I thought it would be fulfilling to work for such an organization, but I never really considered it as a possibility until my adviser, Dr. Michael Hudgens, encouraged me to pursue an internship. It turns out that a successful career at Google was very possible with my background in biostatistics.”

This story originally was published in the Spring 2016 edition of Carolina Public Health Magazine.


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Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu

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