Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar Elected 2024 ASA President
Katherine Thompson Elected Vice President
Madhumita (Bonnie) Ghosh-Dastidar, a senior statistician at the nonprofit RAND Corporation and head of the RAND Statistics Group, was elected the 119th president of the American Statistical Association. She will be the first Asian-American female president and second Asian-American president of the ASA and serve a one-year term as president-elect beginning January 1, 2023; her term as president becomes effective January 1, 2024.
The ASA membership also elected Katherine (Jenny) Thompson, senior mathematical statistician of the Associate Directorate for Economic Programs at the US Census Bureau, as ASA vice president. Thompson’s term begins January 1, 2023.
As president, Ghosh-Dastidar’s platform will focus on three leadership principles of community, collaboration, and opportunity. One of her goals is to strengthen collaborations across ASA sections, chapters, and interest groups. She believes ongoing activities and events such as mixers, hackathons, and conferences are important ways to engage and attract new and current members. Ghosh-Dastidar also wants to continue the ASA’s efforts to engage with other societies. “I believe that we need to work together across disciplines and silos to tackle the biggest challenges of our day,” she said.
Raised in Kolkata, India, in a family that encouraged boys and girls to dream, Ghosh-Dastidar’s commitment to service was inspired by her parents’ dedication to helping the disadvantaged in their community. As a first-generation immigrant working in a leading statistics group in the US, she knows opportunity can change people’s lives and career trajectories. “The support I received has made me passionate about paying it forward by creating opportunity for early-career colleagues and students,” she acknowledged. Ghosh-Dastidar is passionate about advocating for statisticians to take on roles beyond that of skilled technicians—as thought leaders on teams and in organizations, on panels and in policymaking, and in how statistics are communicated by the media.
At RAND, Ghosh-Dastidar works on environmental interventions, behavioral interventions for HIV-positive patients, and population health. Current projects include multiple NIH-funded natural experiment evaluations of the effect of neighborhood-level improvements on residents’ diet, sleep, and cardiovascular health, as well as carefully examining the role of depression in treatment outcomes for HIV-positive individuals. Her prior experiences include being lead statistician for large-scale surveys on sexual assault and assessment in the US military and the first Singapore mental health study to assess national prevalence.
Thompson begins her tenure as ASA vice president after many years of dedicated service to the association. She has served as chair of the Government Statistics Section (as well as the Council of Sections representative) and was the program co-chair for ICES-VI. She is currently the statistics co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.
Thompson is a survey statistician with more than 30 years of professional experience. Her practical and theoretical experience covers all areas of sample survey design, including sample selection, estimation, variance estimation, analysis, statistical data editing, imputation, and quality control. She was elected an ASA Fellow in 2017.
Thompson’s top three priorities for her tenure are to promote the Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice in a variety of accessible forums; encourage the publication of statistical methods and applications in peer-reviewed journals; and expand diversity in the field through educational initiatives, scholarships, and increased opportunities for conference attendance and participation—in person or remotely.
The ASA membership also elected the following board members:
- Jana Asher, Assistant Professor of Statistics, Slippery Rock University, as the Council of Sections Representative to the ASA Board
- Melinda Holt, Professor of Statistics and Associate Dean, Sam Houston State University, as the Council of Chapters Representative to the ASA Board
- Ingrid Van Keilegom, Professor of Operations Research and Business Statistics, KU Leuven, as the International Representative to the ASA Board
- Thomas Love, Professor, Biostatistics and Evaluation Unit, Center for Health Care Research and Policy, Case Western Reserve University, as Chair-Elect of the Council of Sections Governing Board
- Jo Wick, Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Data Science, KU Medical Center, as Chair-Elect of the Council of Chapters Governing Board
ASA Section Officers
Statistical Computing Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Claire Bowen
Program Chair-Elect 2023
David Dahl
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Stephanie Hicks
Statistical Consulting Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Robyn Ball
Publications Officer 2023–2025
Christina Mehta
Executive Committee at Large 2023–2025
Margaret Stedman
Section on Statistics and Data Science
Education Chair-Elect 2023
Kelly McConville
Communications Officer 2023–2025
Sara Stoudt
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Amelia McNamara
Executive Committee at Large 2023–2025
Alana Unfried
Samantha Robinson
Statistics in Defense and National Security Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Abby Nachtsheim
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Sarah Burke
Publications Officer 2023–2024
Snigdhansu Chatterjee
Statistics and the Environment Section
Chair-Elect 2023
William Christensen
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Soutir Bandyopadhyay
Treasurer 2023 (Rotates to Secretary in 2024)
Lyndsay Shand
Statistics in Epidemiology Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Diana Miglioretti
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Fei Ye
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Ran Tao
Statistics in Genomics and Genetics Section
Chair-Elect 2023
George Tseng
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Xiang Zhou
Government Statistics Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Bob Sivinski
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Michael Jadoo
Secretary/Treasurer 2023–2024
Nancy Murray
Publications Officer 2023–2024
Elizabeth Petraglia
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Denise Abreu
Health Policy Statistics Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Layla Parast
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
James O’Malley
Statistics in Imaging Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Marina Vannucci
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Kristin Linn
Statistical Learning and Data Science Section
Chair-Elect 2023
George Michailidis
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Sudeepa Bhattacharyya
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Jaime Speiser
Lifetime Data Science Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Tony Jianguo Sun
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Pamela Shaw, Kaiser-Permanente
Statistics in Marketing Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Elea McDonnell
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Jeremy Yang
Secretary/Publications Officer 2023–2024
Alice Li
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Dan McCarthy
Medical Devices and Diagnostics Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Laura Yee
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Joanne Lin
Council of Sections Representative 2023–2025
Xiaofeng Wang
Mental Health Statistics Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Doug Gunzler
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Adam Ciarleglio
Nonparametric Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Aurore Delaigle
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Lingzhou Xue
Treasurer 2023 (Rotates to Secretary in 2024)
Alexander Giessing
Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
Chair-Elect 2023
Jon Stallrich
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Michael Crotty
Statistical Programmers and Analysts Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Jeanhee Pak
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Luis Mestre
Quality and Productivity Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Maria Weese
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Ryan Lekivetz
Charter Revision
Risk Analysis Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Indranil Ghosh
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Jessica Kim
Social Statistics Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Dylan Small
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Monika Hu
Publications Officer 2023–2024
Claire Kelling
Statistics in Sports Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Guanyu Hu
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Nate Sandholtz
Survey Research Methods Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Don Jang
Program Chair-Elect 2023
Pushpal Mukhopadhyay
Treasurer 2023–2024
Rebecca Andridge
Publications Officer 2023–2024
Hanyu Sun
Education Officer 2023–2024
Julia Soulakova
Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences Section
Chair-Elect 2023
Melinda Higgins