Kathy Ensor

Kathy Ensor is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In her role as a senior full professor at the university, she maintains an active research program, develops and directs large-scale centers, educates students, and helps drive the international conversation for the statistics field. In 2022, she served the statistics community as ASA president.

Ensor grew up in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Her father was a chemistry professor at Arkansas State University. Not only did he earn a PhD, but he was also the first in his family to graduate high school. He and all his siblings went on to achieve great things.

Academic life seemed natural to Ensor from an early age. When she was young, her family lived close to campus and would regularly ride their bikes through campus. She earned a BSE and MS in mathematics from Arkansas State University before moving to College Station, Texas, to pursue her doctorate at Texas A&M.

Growing up in Jonesboro was a gift, says Ensor, and it keeps on giving. She is blessed with a supportive family and close friends, and Arkansas continues to provide the opportunity to be close to nature. She fondly remembers random swims in the lakes, long runs, exhilarating drives through the rural landscape, and building makeshift sleds to enjoy the few days or weeks of snow. And maybe a little less fondly, picking okra on those hot summer days.

As an undergraduate, Ensor was fascinated with probability, statistical graphics, statistical theory, and computers. She was a future data scientist in the making. At age 19, she wrote a Fortran program that could play chess and optimize the next move based on a simplistic probabilistic algorithm and data gleaned from the user of the program. It became clear as she progressed in those years that she would pursue a PhD and—after looking across the fields of math, computer science, operations research, and industrial engineering—she is happy she landed on statistics. It has all the aspects that capture her interests, including the opportunity to collaborate and contribute across the spectrum of science, business, medicine, and engineering.

As president of the ASA, Ensor established the IDEA Forum to showcase how statisticians improve lives through theory and applications of statistics and data science that provide a better understanding of how we live, work, learn, and play, reinforcing her greatest accomplishments, which are her contributions to the profession and society.

Ensor had the opportunity to build the Rice University Department of Statistics from the ground up since she was the first hire of the new department, and she served as chair from 1999–2013. When she looks back over the department’s 35 years and all the international leaders who have come from it, she is extremely proud. Some standing programs established through her leadership include the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems that she established in 2002 and continues to lead; the joint program in biostatistics between Rice Statistics and MD Anderson Biostatistics; the 10-year National Science Foundation VIGRE collaboration between statistics, mathematics, and applied mathematics; the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform; and the recently created Houston Wastewater Epidemiology program.

While Ensor believes all these accomplishments are important, she says she derives her energy and continued commitment to the profession from the amazing community of statisticians and data scientists, her collaborators, doctoral alumni, and students whom she mentored throughout the years.