Rob Santos

Affiliation: Vice President and Chief Methodologist at the Urban Institute; 2020 President-Elect of the American Statistical Association

Educational Background: MA, Statistics, University of Michigan; BA, Mathematics, Trinity University

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Robert (Rob) Santos earned a BA in mathematics from Trinity University after attending San Antonio Community College. Santos went on to earn an MA in statistics from the University of Michigan while learning the art and science of survey sampling at the Survey Research Center of the UM Institute for Social Research. With over 40 years of experience, his expertise spans quantitative and qualitative research design, sampling, survey operations, and statistical analysis, and his specialty areas include undocumented immigrants and other disadvantaged populations. Rob has worked across a wide range of policy areas including hunger, immigration, decennial census counts, education, health, immigration, the environment, housing discrimination, travel behavior, and elections.

Rob has held executive-level leadership positions at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and NORC at the University of Chicago; he was a partner of NuStats, LLC, in Austin, Texas. He has served on numerous panels at the National Academies and was a member of the National Center for Health Statistics Board of Scientific Counselors (2017–2020). He also served on the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly and held elected board positions in the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), Washington Statistical Society, and American Statistical Association (ASA). He is currently ASA President-Elect and will serve as ASA’s 116th president in 2021. He has also served as AAPOR president (2013–2014) and ASA vice president (2015–2017). Santos is an ASA Fellow and a recipient of the 2006 ASA Founders Award.