Affiliation
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service

Educational Background
Oklahoma State University: PhD, Statistics
West Texas State University: MS, Mathematics
West Texas State University: BS, Mathematics

About Linda
Linda grew up in White Deer, Texas, population 1,052 (now 989), where she enjoyed sports (basketball, tennis, volleyball) and spent her summers serving as a lifeguard and teaching swimming lessons.

Between her junior and senior years of high school, she had the opportunity to visit the University of Tennessee for an eight-week National Science Foundation program in probability and Fortran programming. From that point forward, she wanted to study statistics. However, it was not until she went to Oklahoma State that the opportunity really presented itself. When Linda went to the Oklahoma City zoo with a team working to determine why the golden marmosets were getting sick, she knew she had made the right choice, a commitment that continued even while spending hot summers collecting data in the cotton fields of Oklahoma.

During her tenure at three land grant universities (Oklahoma State University, University of Nebraska, and University of Florida), Linda explored her interests in agriculture, the environment, and education. She collaborated with agricultural scientists and other statisticians to address some of the challenging issues facing agriculture—from exploring ways to identify citrus greening (a disease decimating the Florida’s citrus industry) more rapidly and ameliorate its effects, to using non-Bt refugia for management of lepidopteran resistance to Bt corn in Nebraska, to controlling tobacco bollworms and budworms in Oklahoma cotton through breeding and with reduced chemical inputs. With others, she worked on projects such as identifying factors triggering and dissipating red tide, the effect of slow speed zones on manatees, and the impact of rising temperatures on morbidity and mortality. Linda also became involved in statistical education, helping with quantitative literacy projects and becoming involved with AP Statistics.

In 2009, Linda began collaborating on projects with the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics (NASS) Service and, in 2013, she joined NASS as chief mathematical statistician and director of research and development. She led a small team that adapted capture-recapture methods for the analysis of the 2012 Census of Agriculture, which resulted in NASS being able to—for the first time—publish measures of uncertainty for all its census estimates. Recently, she has worked with others to explore the potential of web scraping to develop list frames for surveys. And she has been able to encourage and help staff develop improved methodology and move those methods into NASS’s production processes.

Linda has authored three books and more than 100 publications in more than 50 journals, constituting a mixture of statistics and subject-matter journals. She has been the editor of the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics. Linda has served in a broad range of offices within the professional statistical societies, including president of four ASA chapters (Oklahoma, Nebraska, Florida, and currently the Washington Statistical Society), chair of two sections, chair of the Council of Sections, chair of the Council of Chapters, vice president of the ASA, president of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society, chair of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, member of the National Institute of Statistical Science’s Board of Directors, and member of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute’s Governing Board. Linda is a recipient of the ASA’s Founders Award, a Fellow of the ASA and American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.