CNSTAT February 2024

Upcoming Meetings

February 9, 2024
9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Implementing Behavioral Economics Strategies in State- and Local-Level Interventions to Promote Health and Well-Being—disseminaton meeting for Lessons from Behavioral Economics: Policy Impact and Future Directions; see this site for more information

February 28-29, 2024
Committee on Developing a Strategy to Assess the 5th National Climate Assessment to hold public meeting; see this site for more information.

People News

CNSTAT Was Saddened to Learn of the Death of Barbara Bailar
CNSTAT learned recently of the death of Barbara Bailar last June 13, 2023, at age 88. She held important positions at the Census Bureau, the American Statistical Association (ASA), and NORC at the University of Chicago. She began her career at the Census Bureau in 1958 and worked on path-breaking experiments demonstrating the extent of enumerator variance in the census and the benefits of using self-enumeration via the mail. She also helped begin the use of computer-assisted interviewing and founded an annual research conference. As a member of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, she co-authored Statistical Policy Working Paper 3, An Error Profile: Employment As Measured By The Current Population Survey. She served as chief of research at the Census Bureau from 1974 to 1979, when she became associate director for statistical standards and methodology. She resigned on principle in 1988, disagreeing with a decision of the Secretary of Commerce to close off the possibility of using statistical methods (dual-system estimation) to adjust the 1990 census results for different rates of coverage error for population groups. She subsequently became executive director of ASA and then senior vice president for survey research at NORC, retiring again in 2001. She was an elected member of of the International Statistical Institute, a fellow of ASA, and president of ASA in 1987. She had a Ph.D. from American University.

CNSTAT Congratulates Daniel Kifer, Vonnie McLoyd, Edward (“Eddie”) Telles, and Richard Valliant on Receiving Well-Deserved Recognition

• Daniel Kifer, professor of computer science and director of the Center for Machine Learning and Applications, The Pennsylvania State University, and a member of CNSTAT, received the 2023 PET Award (The Casper Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies). He and co-authors John M. Abowd (former CNSTAT member), Robert Ashmead, Ryan Cumings-Menon, Simson Garfinkel, Micah Heineck, Christine Heiss, Robert Johns, Philip Leclerc, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Brett Moran, William Sexton, Matthew Spence, and Pavel Zhuravlev, were recognized for “The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm,” Harvard Data Science Review Special Issue 2: Differential Privacy for the 2020 U.S. Census.
• Vonnie C. McLoyd, Ewart A. C. Thomas collegiate professor of psychology, University of Michigan, is the 2024 recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, which is presented to “honor significant advances in the psychological and cognitive sciences with important implications for formal and systematic theory.” Her citation reads: “McLoyd has made outstanding contributions as a scholar, mentor, and leader, and through both her empirical and conceptual work, has advanced the standards for developmental psychologists doing scientific work on topics such as poverty, race, family structure, and neighborhoods.” She served on the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and CNSTAT committees that produced A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty (2019) and Reducing Intergenerational Poverty (2023).
• Eddie Telles, professor of sociology at UCLA, is a 2024–2025 Russell Sage Foundation visiting scholar. He will work on intergenerational change in ethnic identity and socio-economic mobility among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio from 1965–2000. Using a longitudinal data set covering four generations of Mexican Americans, he will examine how applicable previous theories about immigrant assimilation are to Mexican Americans, whose skin color and educational attainment are vastly different than the Europeans on which the theories are based. He served on the CNSTAT panel that produced Assessing the 2020 Census: Final Report (2023).
• Richard Valliant, research professor emeritus, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, and Joint Program in Survey Methodology, University of Maryland, and previously with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the 2024 recipient of the Waksberg Award from Survey Methodology (Statistics Canada) and the American Statistical Association. The award was established in 2001 to honor Joseph Waksberg, a giant in survey sampling, who worked at the U.S. Census Bureau from 1940–1972 and then at Westat, where he served as chairman of the board from 1990 until his death in 2006. Valliant served on the CNSTAT panels that produced Measuring Research and Developmentin the US Economy (2005), Small Populations, Large Effects: Improving the Measurement of the Group Quarters Population in the American Community Survey (2012), and Reengineering the Census Bureau’s Annual Economic Surveys (2018)

CNSTAT Welcomes Erika L. McEntarfer as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Erika McEntarfer became the 16th commissioner of BLS on January 31, 2024. She began her career at the Census Bureau in 2002 working on the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. She served in the Office of Tax Policy at the Treasury Department from 2008–2010, returning to the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies where she was lead economist on labor markets. She served as senior economist (on detail) with the Council of Economic Advisers in 2022–23. She is an elected member of the NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. She has a B.A. in social science from Bard Colelge and a Ph.D. in economics from Virginia Tech University.

CNSTAT Welcomes William (“Sandy”) Darity, Jr., and H.V. Jagadish as Members of CNSTAT
Two new members have joined CNSTAT—
• William (Sandy) A. Darity, Jr., is the Samuel DuBois Cook professor of public policy, African and African American studies, and economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. His research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. He was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is a past president of the National Economic Association, the Southern Economic Association, and the Association of Black Sociologists. He was named a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2022 and a Distinguished Fellow of the Southern Economic Association in 2023. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a current member of the CNSTAT panel on An Integrated System of U.S. Household Income, Wealth, and Consumption Data and Statistics to Inform Policy and Research and has served on other panels.

• H.V. Jagadish is the Edgar F. Codd distinguished university professor and Bernard A. Galler collegiate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and director of the Michigan Institute for Data Science. He is well known for his broad-ranging research on information management, with many patents to his name. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the David E. Liddle Research Excellence Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Michigan. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He served on the CNSTAT panels that produced Federal Statistics, Multiple Data Sources, and Privacy Protection: Next Steps (2017) and Transparency in Statistical Information for the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and All Federal Statistical Agencies (2022).