Lila F. Knudsen was originally from Minnesota. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota, with additional graduate training at the US Department of Agriculture Graduate School, and became chief statistician at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1939. She married another FDA worker, Josh Randolph, in 1951, and moved to the National Institutes of Health, where she worked on a part-time basis from 1957 to 1959. She returned to the FDA as a consultant in 1962.[2]
The American Statistical Association elected her as a fellow in 1964 "for her application of statistics to pharmacology and pharmacy; and for the establishment and administration of a statistical program in the Food and Drug Administration".[3]
^Knudsen, Lila F. (1942), "A punched card technique to obtain coefficients of orthogonal polynomials", Journal of the American Statistical Association, 37 (220): 496โ506, doi:10.1080/01621459.1942.10500651, JSTOR2279033, MR0007132