Kimiko Osada Bowman (August 15, 1927 – 13 January 2019)[1] was a Japanese-American statistician known for her work on approximating the probability distribution of maximum likelihood estimators and for her advocacy for people with disabilities.

[1] She contracted polio while young, and became paralyzed from the neck down, but learned to walk again through years of physical therapy.

[2][3] She earned a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Virginia Tech in 1963; her dissertation, advised by Leonard Shenton, was Moments to Higher Orders for Maximum Likelihood Estimates with an Application to the Negative Binomial Distribution.

[2][3][4] As a senior research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Bowman worked on the distributional properties of estimators based on non-normal data.

[1] Bowman also frequently visited Japan in association with the U.S. Office of Naval Research.