Census Bureau Director Robert Groves Appoints New Members and Chairwoman to Scientific Advisory Committee

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves has named 10 new members and a chairwoman to the Census Bureau's Scientific Advisory Committee, which provides advice on the design and implementation of Census Bureau programs.

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"We are excited to add such an array of expertise to our existing committee," Groves said. "These are leading voices from the scientific community, offering the kind of experience and outside perspective that the Census Bureau needs as we adjust to the future of data collection while enhancing our traditional commitment to statistical quality."

The new members are:

• Barbara Anderson, a sociology and population studies professor at the University of Michigan. The former faculty member at Yale and Brown universities has published articles on effects of an interviewer's race in surveys and on issues of data quality.  
• Joshua Angrist, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was an assistant professor at Harvard.
• Daniel Atkins, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Michigan and the associate vice president for research cyberinfrastructure. Atkins' pioneering work in parallel computer architecture and high-speed computer arithmetic is widely used in modern processor chips.
• Lawrence Bobo, a social sciences professor at Harvard University. Bobo has held tenured appointments in the sociology departments at the University of Wisconsin, UCLA and Stanford University.
• Noel Cressie, a statistics professor at Ohio State University. Cressie earned his doctorate at Princeton and is director of the program in spatial and environmental statistics at Ohio State.
• Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, Calif. ESRI is a privately held geographic information systems software company.
• Irma Elo, a sociology professor, research associate and former director of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Population Sciences Subcommittee and a former chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics.
• Robert Hummer, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center at the University of Texas. He is a social demographer whose work focuses on racial/ethnic, immigrant/native, socioeconomic and religious differences in health and mortality in the United States.
• Sharon Lohr, a statistics professor from Arizona State University. Her research focuses on survey sampling, design of experiments and applications of statistics in the social sciences and education.  She an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and a fellow of the American Statistical Association.  
• Sally Morton, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health. She was once vice president for statistics and epidemiology at RTI International in North Carolina, head of the RAND Corporation's statistics group and president of the American Statistical Association.

Groves appointed Guillermina Jasso as chairwoman of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee. Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University, was the founding director of the Methods Workshop at New York University (1991-1997), the founding director of the Theory Workshop at the University of Iowa (1988-1991) and co-founder of the Life Course Center at the University of Minnesota.

Jasso heads the 20 members of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, who each serve three-year terms. The committee meets twice a year to address policy, research and technical issues relating to a full range of Census Bureau programs and activities, including communications, decennial, demographic, economic, field operations, geographic, information technology and statistics.

For more on the Census Advisory Committees, go to http://www.census.gov/cac/.  

Editor's note: News releases, reports and data tables are available on the Census Bureau's home page. Go to http://www.census.gov and click on "Releases."

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SOURCE U.S. Census Bureau