The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) and the Caucus for Women in Statistics have selected Katherine B. Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University, for the prestigious 2025 Florence Nightingale David Award and Lectureship.
Ensor will receive the award at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings in Nashville, Tenn., between August 2-7, where she will deliver the F.N. David Lecture and be presented with the award consisting of a plaque and a cash honorarium of $2,000. Her lecture, entitled “Brave New World: Fact or Fiction,” will focus on the critical role community analytics plays in bringing scientific rigor and understanding to the important questions faced by our communities and the changing nature of this scientific space in 2025.
Established in 2001, the award recognizes extraordinary leadership and contributions to the statistics profession; outstanding mentorship to the next generation of statisticians and data scientists; and excellence in collaborative team science research. This award is named after Florence Nightingale David, an accomplished statistician and the first recipient of the Elizabeth L. Scott Award. It is awarded biennially to a female statistician who serves as a role model to other women by her contributions to the profession through excellence in research, of multidisciplinary collaborative groups, statistics education, or service to the professional societies.
“F.N. David made incredible contributions to the field of statistics and society throughout her lengthy career spanning both England and the United States,” Ensor said. “Foundations in our fields can be attributed to her, and her collaborations with Karl Pearson and Jerzy Neyman. I am immensely honored to be recognized by the statistics community with this prestigious award.”
Ensor is a leading expert in developing and applying statistical methodologies to help build resilient and adaptive communities. She develops statistical techniques to answer a wide range of public health and environmental science questions. In May 2020, she began establishing and implementing the statistical system for assessing the pertinent health information from wastewater samples for SARS-CoV-2 and variants of concern. As the co-lead of the Houston Wastewater Epidemiology Program, this program has been expanded to include up to 29 communicable illnesses. Prior to the wastewater effort, she oversaw the creation of the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform, a data repository and secure computing environment and key infrastructure for the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Currently, Ensor is collaborating with the U.S. Census Bureau to develop strategies for improved data integration across refined spatial and temporal scales.
In addition to tracking and forecasting issues in public health, community analytics, and environmental statistics, Ensor specializes in the application of time-series data to analyze problems in finance. She is the director of Rice’s Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES). She has published 110 scientific papers, which are heavily cited in the statistical literature.
Ensor has a strong history of service to the statistics, applied sciences and engineering communities. She has served as the 117th President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is currently leading the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee on Frontiers of Statistics: 2035 and Beyond, 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 the Statistics section for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Ensor has been recognized for her leadership, scholarship, and mentoring. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an International Statistical Institute (ISI) Elected Member, and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). She received the American Statistical Association’s Founders Award in 2024 and was inducted in 2021 to the Texas A&M College of Science Academy of Distinguished Former Students.