Amy H. Herring


Amy Helen Herring is an American biostatistician interested in longitudinal data and reproductive health. Formerly the Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor of Children's Environmental Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is now a professor in the Department of Statistical Science and research professor in the Global Health Institute of Duke University. She was the lead researcher on a 2013 study whose data showed many American women were reportedly virgins at the birth of their first child.

Education and career

Herring graduated summa cum laude from the University of Mississippi in 1995, with a double major in English and mathematics. She completed an Sc.D in biostatistics at Harvard University in 2000; her dissertation, supervised by Joseph G. Ibrahim, was Missing Covariants in Survival Analysis.
She joined the North Carolina faculty in 2000, where she became a fellow of the Carolina Population Center in 2006 and Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor of Children's Environmental Health in 2015. She moved to Duke in 2017 as part of a hiring initiative to expand Duke's faculty in the quantitative sciences.

Research

In 2013, a longitudinal study led by Herring and published in the British Medical Journal compared the dates of childbirth and of first intercourse reported in separate questions by a sample of American women, and determined that according to this data one out of every 200 women in the US had given virgin birth. Herring stated that she found it "highly unlikely" that these women believed themselves to be virgins at the time of their children's births, and suggested that the result might instead be a combination of unintentional inaccuracies by the subjects and of respondents being unwilling to admit to having intercourse.

Awards and honors

In 2010, Herring was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. She won the Gertrude M. Cox Award for outstanding contributions to applied statistics in 2012. In the same year, the American Public Health Association gave her their Mortimer Spiegelman Award.