COPSS-NISS Leadership Webinar Series: Leadership in Government

About the Speakers

Denice Ross serves as the U.S. Chief Data Scientist in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the National Conference on Citizenship, where she led a multidisciplinary group of stakeholders to coordinate support for a high quality census despite a pandemic and unprecedented political pressure. She also co-authored the data series "Pandemic to Prosperity," with a special focus on Southern states and their path to an equitable recovery. She was a Fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, providing startup support for the new State Chief Data Officer Network. At New America, she studied climate security and the power of networks to advance progress on big challenges.  As a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama administration, she co-founded the White House Police Data Initiative to increase transparency and accountability and worked with the Department of Energy on crowdsourcing private-sector data to improve community resilience in disaster-impacted areas. Earlier, she served as Director of Enterprise Information for the City of New Orleans, where she established their open data initiative, now recognized as one of the most successful in the country.

Robert L. Santos is the 26th director of the U.S. Census Bureau. He was sworn in on January 5, 2022. Santos’ career spans more than 40 years in survey research, statistical design and analysis, and executive-level management. He previously served for 15 years as vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute and directed its Statistical Methods Group. He was executive vice president and partner of NuStats, a social science research firm in Austin, Texas.  Santos has held leadership positions in the nation’s top survey research organizations, including the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, where he served as vice president of statistics and methodology and director of survey operations; the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, as director of survey operations; and Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research, as senior study director and sampling statistician.  Santos specializes in quantitative and qualitative research design, including program evaluation, needs assessments, survey methodology and survey operations. He also has expertise in demographic and administrative data, decennial censuses, social policy research and equity issues in research.  Santos served as the 2021 president of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is an ASA Fellow and recipient of the ASA Founder’s Award in 2006. He was the 2014 president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and received the 2021 AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement. Santos is also an elected member to the International Statistical Institute, and he served from 2017 to 2020 as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was a longtime member of the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly.  Santos was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He graduated from high school at Holy Cross of San Antonio. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Trinity University in San Antonio and an M.A. in statistics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

About the Moderator

Claire McKay Bowen is a principal research associate in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population and leads the Statistical Methods Group at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on developing and assessing the quality of differentially private data synthesis methods and science communication. In 2021, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies identified her as an emerging leader in statistics for her technical contributions and leadership to statistics and the field of data privacy and confidentiality. She is also a member of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee and the Differential Privacy Working Group, an advisory board member of the Future of Privacy Forums, and an adjunct professor at Stonehill College.