Bio
Vicki Lancaster is a Principal Scientist at the Social & Decision Analytics Division (SDAD) of the Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative at the University of Virginia. Her areas of expertise are experimental design, visualizations, data analysis and interpretation.
Her prior positions include Research Scientist at the Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory within the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech; Mathematical Statistician at the Food and Drug Administration; and Senior Scientist at the environmental consulting firm Neptune and Company, Inc. During her career she has worked with scientists at the EPA, DoD, and USDA on projects that include developing a classification model based on morphological characteristics used to identify Africanized and European honeybees; constructing the experimental designs and conducting the analyses that lead to the removal of Roxarsone in poultry feed, a source of arsenic contamination in poultry; developing a detection system for biological contaminants in our nation’s water supply; and simulation modeling to help researchers identify the location of unexploded ordnances (UXO) at formerly used defense sites.
In her current position she has been the lead on two cooperative agreements with the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, the skilled technical workforce and visualization. She just completed a MINERA project where she constructed an experimental design to characterize the emergence and dynamics of common knowledge through interactions among individuals. Currently she is leading two Census Curated Data Environment pilot projects. One project constructs metrics to evaluate how prepared skilled nursing facilities and the communities they reside in are able to handle extreme climate events and the other to estimate the number of food insecure households at the census tract level.
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Ph.D. in Statistics, Kansas State University
M.S. in Statistics with a Minor in Mathematics, Louisiana State University
B.S. Areas of concentration: Chemistry and Russian Studies, Louisiana State University
In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon commissioned the first and only White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health, which became a catalyst for much-needed progress in U.S. policy focused on hunger and malnutrition. What was set in motion over the course of the three-day conference changed the national landscape around food and nutrition policy, and has had lasting impact almost five decades years later.