Data Science for the Public Good Distinguished Speaker Series: Katherine Ensor

Missed the event? Access the recording of the talk and the slide deck here.

Community Analytics and the Value of University/City Partnerships

Abstract: In today’s data-driven world, statisticians and data scientists are in high demand. A key area where their talents and skills contribute is a better understanding of cities and communities. Through strong university and local government partnerships, advanced statistics provide needed knowledge to guide community actions, city processes, and regional policies. In this talk, Dr. Ensor will give key examples of such partnerships, highlighting how local governments in the Houston area capitalize on universities in the region and the dual enrichment of the university environment. Dr. Ensor will examine contributions toward improved flood management, understanding the extent of benzene exposure in the community, and Rice University’s extensive collaboration with Houston Health Department around COVID-19, including establishing the wastewater epidemiology system for the City. Each case study will highlight the improved actions and policy implications resulting from the university and local government collaboration. Dr. Ensor will also discuss key aspects of successful partnerships.

Katherine Ensor is a leading expert in applying computational and statistical analysis to track and forecast issues in public health, community informatics, environmental statistics, and computational finance. She is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University. She served as chair of Rice’s Department of Statistics from 1999 to 2013 and has been a faculty member for 35 years. Her research is highly cited and has been published in over 40 journal publications. In addition to developing statistical techniques to answer large-dimension problems in public health and environmental science, she 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) and from 2016 through 2022 served as the founding director and creator of the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform, a resource for the greater Houston area. Ensor is the 117th president of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. To learn more about Katherine, click here.

We hope you will attend this exciting event.

Sponsored By:

Westat, Washington Statistical Society, NORC at the University of Chicago, American Statistical Association, Rstudio, and Sage Publishing.

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