Katherine B. Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University, has been named chair of a new National Academies ad hoc committee charged with assessing statistical sciences and emerging opportunities for the discipline and its stakeholders.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) are the nation’s pre-eminent source for objective analysis and advice on complex problems. Ensor’s 14-member committee is called Frontiers of Statistics in Science and Engineering: 2035 and Beyond.
“It’s an honor to be invited to lead this highly talented, interdisciplinary team of experts. We will be making important recommendations to funding agencies and our country’s government both within statistics and in the fields that incorporate statistical sciences through rapidly evolving technologies, such as AI and data science,” said Ensor.
As chair, Ensor will work with the committee members to produce forward-looking assessments of statistical research, education and workforce development across science and engineering domains to strengthen American competitiveness in manufacturing, materials science, finance and blockchain, biomedical and biological sciences, public health, medicine, geosciences, environmental health and science, and energy applications.
Ensor is known globally for her computational and statistical analysis to help build resilient and adaptive communities. Efforts have applied statistics and data science to track and forecast issues in public health, community and urban analytics, energy and environmental statistics, and computational finance and risk analytics.
Through multidisciplinary collaborations with the City of Houston and the Houston Health Department, she works to make innovation sustainable. As an executive team member and co-principal investigator of Houston Wastewater Epidemiology, a CDC National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) Center of Excellence, she is working to scale wastewater-based epidemiology as a new frontier of disease prevention.
“Kathy’s leadership and dedication toward the advancement of statistical sciences have been instrumental in shaping the integration of computer science and techniques in statistical analysis. Her contributions are woven into the very fabric of what our School of Engineering and Computing is today. I am thrilled at her new role and excited about the opportunities it will bring,” said Luay Nakhleh, Rice’s William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing.
The President of the National Academy of Sciences appoints NASEM committee chairs and members after a careful review process. They are selected based on their expertise and knowledge related to priority topics.
Rice alumnus, data scientist and global climate risk analyst Steve Sain ’90 ’94 of Jupiter Intelligence was selected as a committee member. At Jupiter, Sain provides clients with data and analytics services to predict and manage risks arising from weather and climate change.
Ensor served as chair of Rice’s Department of Statistics from 1999 to 2013. During this time, she was instrumental in many initiatives that are active today, such as the joint Ph.D. program with MD Anderson supported by an NIH T32 Training Program in Cancer Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, the Professional Master in Statistics (MStat), the curriculum for the MStat specialization in Quantitative Finance and Risk Analytics, and the successful undergraduate minor in Financial Computation and Modeling (FCAM). She has been director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems since 2002.
Ensor is a member of the Board of Trustees for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) and serves as chair of Section U (Statistics) for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She recently served as the first statistician on the Computer Science Academic Board (CSAB)—an organization within the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)—and was a member of the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics from 2015 to 2021.
The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the world's largest community of statisticians. Ensor served as the 117th president of ASA, a three-year term from 2021-2023 that involved a one-year appointment as president-elect and past president. In 2024, she was awarded the ASA Founders Award, the highest honor given by ASA. She is a fellow of ASA, ISI, RSS, and AAAS.