AUG. 15, 2018 — The U.S. Census Bureau has named five new members and a chair to the Census Bureau’s Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC). The committee provides advice on the design, operation and implementation of Census Bureau programs.

New committee chair, Allison Plyer began serving as chair of the CSAC on August 15, 2018. Dr. Plyer has served as a CSAC member since 2015 and as chief demographer of The Data Center New Orleans, a private nonprofit organization devoted to independent research.

Dr. Plyer heads the 21 members of the CSAC, who each serve three-year terms. The committee meets twice a year to address policy, research and technical issues relating to a full range of Census Bureau programs and activities, including census tests, policies and operations.

The new CSAC members are:

• Jay Breidt, professor and past chair of the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University, has expertise in survey sampling, time series, nonparametric regression and uncertainty quantification for complex scientific models. He received his Ph.D. at Colorado State University in 1991 and spent the first nine years of his career at Iowa State University as an assistant professor and tenured associate professor before returning to Colorado State in 2000.
• Thomas M. Cook, is a founding partner of Decision Analytics International and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Tom developed large-scale information systems for LTV Aerospace Corporation and was a professor at the University of Tulsa. He also served as president of the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (AGIFORS), president of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and president of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
• Dr. Mario Marazzi, has been the executive director of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics (PRIS) since 2007 and is a member of the International Statistical Institute. He is responsible for leading the development of PRIS, including its research initiatives, technical assistance and training programs as well as its extensive collaborations with federal and international organizations. 
• Jessica McKellar, is a founder and CTO of Pilot (a bookkeeping firm). She is also a founder and former vice president of Engineering for Zulip, a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she served as director of engineering. Since 2012, she has led the community outreach initiatives for PyCon, an annual Python conference lauded for elevating the standards for effective diversity and inclusion in open source communities.
• Kunal Talwar, is a research scientist at Google Brain and an associate editor for the SIAM Journal of Computing. He has made major contributions to differential privacy standards, metric embeddings and discrepancy theory. He has co-authored over 70 papers and holds a dozen patents. His work has been recognized by the Privacy Enhancing Technologies award in 2009 and the ICLR Best Paper award in 2017.

The CSAC will meet for their fall 2018 meeting at Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, Md., September 13-14, 2018. Agenda topics include updates on the 2018 Census Test and 2020 Census systems readiness and program management updates.

The Census Bureau is accepting nominations to fill five additional CSAC vacancies through a Federal Register Announcement.

Visit our Census Advisory Committees page for more information.

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