Against the odds: From Toowoomba to triumph

World-leading statistician Lynne Billard was once denied university scholarships because she was a woman, but thanks to a rare offer from UNSW, a world of opportunity opened up. Now, she’s giving back to her alma mater by supporting women in STEM through a generous bequest. 

Professor Lynne Billard’s humble beginnings in Toowoomba – where she milked cows and helped raise her five younger siblings – are a far cry from the illustrious career in statistics she went on to enjoy. 

Known for her groundbreaking work on the incubation period of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, Lynne has published more than 200 papers and eight books. She was appointed Head of the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Georgia in 1980, becoming the first female department head in the university’s 200-year history. She also presided over the world’s largest statistical societies – the International Biometric Society and the American Statistical Association – earning a slew of awards along the way.

At 80 years old, Lynne is still working with research students and travelling the world attending conferences. But to hear her tell it, she can’t take credit for her success.  

“It came in my genes. It came from my mother,” she says. “My mother was absolutely brilliant – a genius in the real sense of the word. If you go to Taree High School and look at the honours board, she’s still the only person to have earned first-class honours in three subjects: maths one, maths two and physics. She did that, having skipped two years of schooling.”  

Lynne’s mother, Chris Billard, grew up on a dairy farm in Comboyne, New South Wales, the fourth of six children. Her father died when she was nine, prompting one of her brothers to leave school at age 12 to run the farm. While all the children were intelligent, Chris was particularly gifted – so much so that her two older brothers pooled their money and arranged for their younger sister to study a Bachelor of Science at the University of Sydney. It was the 1930s, and Chris was still only 16.  

After graduating, Chris went to teacher’s college and became a teacher. Her first job was in Moree, where she met her future husband, Col, an administrator in the Toowoomba Foundry.

UNSW and the ‘big break’ that almost didn’t happen

For Lynne, success didn’t come easily at first. As a bright school leaver in 1961, she was shut out from numerous university scholarships – even though she’d topped the Queensland state exams in mathematics.

“I applied for a number of different ones at universities in Queensland. But they all came back to me and said, ‘You’re not eligible. They’re only for men.’”

The only institution to offer her a scholarship was across the border. “I received a ‘cadetship’ to study a Bachelor of Science with Honours at UNSW. We had to do double Honours in mathematics, then teach at the University for three years. We were exempt from fees and given a stipend – just enough to live on.”

It was only through a rare twist of fate that Lynne was offered a scholarship at UNSW that year. “By and large, they were giving out three cadetships to men. But that year they gave three to men and three to women. Years later, I found out it was all because of Professor John Blatt, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at UNSW at the time. He was an international figure with a huge reputation. He kept insisting that they give some of the cadetships to women, but everyone opposed him. Eventually, Blatt was so highly regarded that they gave in.”

While teaching at UNSW, Lynne completed her PhD in sequential analysis. In that time, she met the late Sir David Cox – considered the greatest statistician of all time – when he spent six weeks in the department at UNSW. Years later, in 1986, she and David collaborated on the research into the incubation period of HIV/AIDS. 

“I had arranged to have a sabbatical with Sir David Cox at Imperial College in London for six months… At the time, it was largely believed that the incubation period from infection with HIV until AIDS diagnosis was about two years. But we found that for young children it was about three years, while for adults it was more like nine to 10 years. I still remember standing in David’s office when we worked it out. We were worried. Did we have enough data for it to be robust? But we decided it was so drastically different to what was thought at the time that we had to get it out. 

“It was international news. I was attending a conference and when I went back to my hotel room there were 100 messages from television stations and newspapers… The research we did totally changed the way health educators went about educating people about HIV/AIDS.”

Honouring her mother and supporting women in STEM

During the six decades Lynne has taught mathematics in universities, she has seen huge improvements for women in some areas – notably, the number of women undergraduates – while others haven’t changed. 

“The perception is that things are now equal, but the data do not support that perception. Hiring is pretty equal between men and women across disciplines. But the gap between the per cent of men who are promoted and the per cent of women who are promoted hasn’t changed.”

Lynne has been an ambassador for UNSW’s Do The Maths program for young women in Years 10 to 12. In 2016, she travelled to UNSW Sydney to speak to 200 rapt high school students. “It was just incredibly uplifting to see all those girls so keenly interested in mathematics,” she has said.

Lynne is leaving a generous gift in her Will to UNSW to fund a number of scholarships for women to study STEM subjects at UNSW. She wants the scholarships to be in her mother’s name.  

“I hope that we’ll get more women into STEM, particularly mathematics. We need it. Because we can’t keep going with the few people we have in those disciplines these days. I think it’s a big problem for us as a world… Universities do the pure research; industry applies it to some product to make money. When COVID came along, we were very lucky to find the vaccine so quickly. If that basic research hadn’t been done earlier, we might still be spending time in our homes without leaving.”

Reflecting on her life, Lynne’s admiration for her mother as a role model shines through. She is equally grateful for the cadetship at UNSW, calling it “the biggest break in my professional life”. 

“I went to university because my mother insisted that we were all going to university if we wanted to. And I had that cadetship at UNSW that made it relatively easy. Where would I be without my mother, without that cadetship? Probably still living in Toowoomba, having started out as a secretary or something. All my success stems from those two sources. 

“I’ve had some incredibly good opportunities. I still shake my head and say, ‘Why me?’”

Leave a lasting gift by making UNSW a beneficiary in your will. For more information, contact giftsinwills@unsw.edu.au or +61 478 492 032.