As a Wahoo, Kate Douglass has stockpiled achievements both in and outside of the pool. (Left: University Communications photo; right: Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
When Kate Douglass reflects on this past academic year on Grounds, she refers to it as the time she was a “normal student” at the University of Virginia.
The thing is, though, as UVA professor Ken Ono notes, “There’s nothing normal about Kate Douglass.”
Ono speaks from the perspective of someone who advises Douglass with her academics and also serves in a data analyst role with the Cavalier swim team, the powerhouse program that Douglass shined for from 2019 to 2023.
Ono’s had a poolside view of one of the best swimmers in the world. Douglass, a 15-time NCAA champion and a bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Games, makes her Olympic return this week in Paris, where she’ll compete in at least four events and has a legitimate chance to medal in all of them.
“Normal” also doesn’t give justice to a graduate student who, over one semester, co-wrote three in-depth research papers, including one article that caught the eye of a world-renowned mathematician.
This was part of how Douglass spent this past spring in Charlottesville.
“Extraordinary,” Ono said.
Ono is the STEM adviser to the provost in addition to working on Grounds as a data scientist, mathematician and statistician. Douglass, who received her bachelor’s degree in statistics in 2023, chose to stay at UVA and begin pursuit of a master’s in the subject while training for the Olympics at the Aquatic and Fitness Center. Her schedule was slightly lighter than before, as she was no longer competing for the Wahoos.
“I was just like a normal student and a professional swimmer,” Douglass said. “So, it felt a little different just because of that aspect. … I didn’t have the UVA athlete backpack anymore. I just had my plain, black backpack and I was just kind of chilling under the radar and just going to stat class. It was nice.”
Ono was well aware that Douglass planned to take full advantage of this seemingly less-strenuous lifestyle. As her faculty adviser, Ono received a note from an ambitious Douglass last spring announcing her intention to further her education.
“She has such an intellectual curiosity,” Ono said. “She’s kind of a dream student in that way. She emailed in March 2023 and said, ‘I want to talk about what we could possibly do with a master’s.’
“We’re over a year later, and the results speak for themselves.”
Douglass, who took three courses in the fall and another two in the spring, said she “just wanted to have something else to focus on outside of the pool.” When she wasn’t working on her butterfly or breaststroke, she was dialed into statistical research.
In March, she co-wrote “Swimming in Data” with men’s swimmers August Lamb and Will Tenpas, UVA alumnus and current MIT grad student Jerry Lu, and Ono. The piece, a quantitative analysis of swimming performance, was later featured in the June issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, with Douglass gracing the magazine’s cover.
She led the same group of authors on a related article, “Digital Twins,” that Scientific American magazine published earlier this month.
The Scientific Bulletin is where her third paper, a purely academic and non-swimming-related piece she completed with only Ono, resides. It provides a conclusion around Benford’s law – the law of anomalous numbers – that gained the attention of Florian Luca, a Romanian mathematician and former Guggenheim Fellowship winner who’s considered a “world expert in his field by international peers.”
“When he saw it posted to the archive,” Ono said of Luca, “he said, ‘I have to study this paper.’ Kate and I prove a theorem which opened the possibility for a question that we didn't know how to answer. And within a few weeks, he had sent us the paper, solving our problem.”
Luca, for the record, initially had no idea of Douglass’ swimming prowess.
“I heard that Douglass is a world champion swimmer and a two-time Olympian,” Luca said in an email. “Surely, she is the fastest mathematician in the pool in the world.”
Add that line to the resume that continues to grow with stunning accomplishments both in and outside natatoriums.
“To publish a paper is an achievement for a student at any level,” Ono said, “but she wrote three papers on two wildly different topics this spring semester. I’ve never had that before.”
A job in the data analytics field is something Douglass, who could complete her master’s as early as next year, said she’ll likely pursue once her swimming career ends. Until then, she’ll continue to chase Olympic medals and make her university proud.
“At the University of Virginia, we’re a role model for top-level institutions in higher education,” Ono said, “and Kate is a shining example of what is possible both in the classroom and in the pool.”
University News Associate University Communications
fpa5up@virginia.edu (434) 924-6856
November 21, 2024
