Kimiko O. Bowman

Kimiko Osada was born in Japan in 1927 before emigrating to the United States in 1951. She became a U.S. citizen in 1958.[1]

She contracted polio while young, and became paralyzed from the neck down, but learned to walk again through years of physical therapy.[2]

She began her undergraduate studies in home economics at Radford College, but was persuaded by the college president to become a scientist. She studied both mathematics and chemistry and completed a B.S.Ed. in mathematics in 1960.[2][3] She earned a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Virginia Tech in 1963; her dissertation, advised by Leonard Shenton, was Moments to Higher Orders for Maximum Likelihood Estimates with an Application to the Negative Binomial Distribution.[2][3][4]

As a senior research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Bowman worked on the distributional properties of estimators based on non-normal data.[1] Bowman also frequently visited Japan in association with the U.S. Office of Naval Research.[2][3] After 45 years of service, she retired in 1994.[1]

Bowman became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1976.[5][2] She was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.[2]

In 1987, she was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Tokyo,[3] becoming the first foreigner to be so honored.[2]