Dr. Washington is the Director and lead principal investigator of the NSF-funded National Data Science Alliance (NDSA) and the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). She works across Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to increase the number of Blacks with expertise in data science and expand data science research that advocates for social justice.

Most recently, Dr. Washington was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the Convergence Accelerator, and she was instrumental in building and establishing NSF's first Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program. She is the recipient of the 2019 BEYA STEM Innovator Award, the 2019 Outstanding Faculty Award from Howard University, and the 2020 NSF Director's Award for Superior Accomplishment. She is a Fellow of the AWM, the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).