Each year, the Ellis Ott Scholarship Governing Committee awards two $7,500 scholarships to promising master’s and PhD candidates pursuing advanced degrees in statistics and related disciplines. The scholarship program honors Ellis Ott, founder of one of the earliest US-based applied and mathematical statistics departments at Rutgers University. Ott was a recipient of the Shewhart Medal and an early collaborator in the founding of the American Society for Quality.
This year’s recipients are the following:
- Blessed Mbogo, MS Applied Statistics, Rochester Institute of Technology
- Aubree Krager, PhD Statistical Science, University of California at Santa Cruz
Blessed Mbogo
Blessed Mbogo is pursuing his Master of Science in applied statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology. As a pre-medical student at Gallaudet University, he earned his Bachelor of Science in biology with a minor in mathematics and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. He was recognized as one of the top scholar-athletes as a finalist in 2025 for the NCAA’s Walter Byers Scholarship and graduated Summa Cum Laude with university honors with the thesis, “Association of Psychological Quality of Life Scores and Adverse Experiences in STOP2 Multi-Center Clinical Trial,” which was awarded funding through the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Student Traineeship Award.
Mbogo has authored and published scholarly research in various peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Cystic Fibrosis, Journal of Visualized Experiments, and Disability and Health Journal. Ever since his freshman year of undergraduate studies, he was immediately involved in graduate-level research, in which he learned, received mentorship, and applied statistical and machine learning methods to clinical research with Python, R, and specialized institutional software under organizations such as Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Michigan Family Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Gallaudet University, and University of Florida Public Health. Striving for accessibility, he developed bilingual computational workflows in both American Sign Language and English, which were published in the Journal of Visualized Experiment. As a pre-med student that shadowed and conducted research with clinicians, he had the privilege of disseminating complex statistics with compassion and clarity to stakeholders, clinicians, patients, parents, and other researchers in a clinically meaningful context. From there, Mbogo developed a desire to become a medical scientist to contribute to statistics as an accessible tool for population health and mentor the next generation of applied statisticians, including those from deaf/hard-of-hearing and underrepresented backgrounds.
Aubree Krager
Aubree Krager is a statistical science PhD student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics from California State University, Fullerton in 2024. She has applied statistics to many problems, including children’s social-emotional development, Alzheimer’s disease risk factors, and maternal health disparities.
Upon completing her first year at UCSC, Krager worked at Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine under the supervision of Sam Behseta. Her role there was to help medical students and professors analyze data for their capstone projects and classroom development. At Kaiser, she also worked with the National Institutes of Health–funded AllofUs dataset to assess the relationship between preterm birth and having anxiety and depression. Her current research under Paul Parker at UCSC and Rebecca Killick at Clemson University works to improve survey inference using small area estimation with graphical modeling to provide better tools to support more informed public policy decisions.
Krager enjoys helping teach introductory statistics and general research skills to undergraduate students. She was a teaching assistant for the SoCal Data Science Program, supporting six groups of students through their research projects. Furthermore, she is a teaching assistant for introductory statistics at UC Santa Cruz. Krager is determined to inform more equitable decision-making in clinical practice and public health.
Ellis R. Ott scholarships are awarded under the auspices of the American Society for Quality Statistics Division.
Ellis R. Ott Scholarship Governing Board
Mark Vandeven, Chair
Mindy Hotchkiss
J. Stuart Hunter
Joel Smith
Susan O. Schall
Ronald Snee
Lynne Hare
Daksha Chokshi
Joe Voelkel
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