Graduates: Calandra Tate, Ph.D.


Dr. Tate on SisterMentors:
The cohort of women that surrounded me and their support and sharing proved to be critical to my success in completing my Ph.D. I remember that it wasn't until I went on my first SisterMentors retreat in the spring of 2007 that I really started to make progress. The serene atmosphere in the secluded woods, hearing nothing but intellectual discussions, and having positive thoughts certainly gave my stalled (but what seemed to be going dead) dissertation battery a much-needed jolt of energy. From then on, my work sessions became much more focused and productive. I actually started to see positive change in my progress and felt a genuine sense of readiness as the dissertation submission and defense dates got closer and closer....more	Dr. Calandra Tate SisterMentors Graduate
Bio
Calandra R. Tate earned her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park in November 2007 just as she was celebrating her thirtieth birthday. Her dissertation is titled, An Investigation of the Relationship Between Automated Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics and User Performance on an Information Extraction Task. She received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Xavier University, Louisiana in 1999 where she started as pre-med and considered majoring in French, before switching to mathematics. Dr. Tate currently teaches statistics and probability at the United States Military Academy at West Point through a special assignment with her employer, the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland. Her employment at ARL began in the summer of 1998 while she was pursuing her doctorate. She began at ARL as a fellow in the STARS student fellowship program conducting summer research in acoustics and meteorology in the Battlefield Environment Division. Dr. Tate then transferred to the Multilingual Research Team of the Computer and Communication Sciences Division where she worked on a range of projects related to the evaluation of language technologies. She has co-authored several articles including, "Combining evaluation metrics via loss functions," (AMTA, August 2006) and "Acoustic scintillations and angle-of-arrival fluctuations observed outdoors with a large planar vertical microphone array," (Acoustics Research Letters Online, July 1999). Dr. Tate is originally from Zachary, Louisiana, a small town just outside of Baton Rouge. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring her creativity through crafts, home projects, and event design and planning. She is actively involved in her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She has a passion for working with youth, mainly through academic programs encouraging them to pursue and excel in math, science, and technology. She is the first in her family to go to college.