Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams (born November 6) is an American mathematician who works as a Technical Director and Data Scientist for the United States Department of Defense.^[1] She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Mississippi.

She is the daughter of a police officer and grew up in South Central Los Angeles. Moving to a better neighborhood in Los Angeles as a teenager. She went to Westchester High School^[1] and attended summer enrichment programs for underrepresented students there that included courses at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a field trip to see the Space Shuttle at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base.^[1][2] She graduated in 1991.

As an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach, Cotwright-Williams started in engineering. Then, as a math major, she struggled initially and earned low enough grades to be academically disqualified from the university, but worked hard to return as a student in good standing, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2000. She then earned a master's degree in mathematics from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2002.^[1][3] Initially intending to follow a science & math Ph.D. track, she was persuaded to shift to pure mathematics under the mentorship of an African-American professor, Stella R. Ashford,^[1][2] who became the supervisor for her master's thesis in number theory, Unique Factorization in Bi-Quadratic Number Fields.

She went on to doctoral studies at the University of Mississippi, where she became president of the Graduate Student Council^[4] and earned a second master's degree there along the way in 2004.^[1][3] She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Mississippi in 2006. Her dissertation was supervised by T. James Reid and concerned matroid theory.^[5] She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the university,^[4] and was part of a group of four African-Americans who all graduated in the same year.^[6][7]

After completing her doctorate, Cotwright-Williams worked as a tenure-track faculty member in mathematics at Wake Forest University, Hampton University, and Norfolk State University.^[1][8] While working there, in an effort to shift her career to a government track, she began studying public policy and working on collaborative research on Bayesian network based drone control systems with NASA, and on a US Navy project involving measurement uncertainty.^[1][4] In 2010, she completed a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy Analysis at Old Dominion University.^[3] She applied for an American Mathematical Society Congressional Fellowship, and was turned down on her first application but succeeded in her second, in 2012.^[1][4][8]

Cotwright-Williams also became a 2012–2013 Legislative Branch Fellow, under the American Association for the Advancement of Science Science and Technology Policy Fellowship program.^[9] She also worked as a science and technology Fellow for both the Senate and the House of Representatives. While a Congressional Fellow she worked as a staffer on the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and her responsibilities included responding to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.^[1][4][10] In 2014 she worked on data quality for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and in 2015 she became Hardy-Apfel IT Fellow at the Social Security Administration.^[4] Her work at the Social Security Administration has included business analytics to prevent fraud and support data warehousing.^[3] In 2018, with the fellowship expiring, she moved again to the United States Department of Defense as a data scientist.^[1][11]

Cotwright-Williams continues to hold an adjunct professorial lecturer position in mathematics and statistics at American University.^[12] She serves as an at-large member of the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM).^[13]

Her career advice includes the following quote: "Get out and talk to people and learn new things!"^[14]

• Outside of Academia Member in the National Association of Mathematicians^[10][15]
• Black History Month 2017 Honoree, Mathematically Gifted & Black^[16]