Leadership is a key component of my day-to-day, mid-term and long-term contributions. Throughout my career, I have helped shape and develop the various communities to which I belong. At Rice University I have held many leadership roles at all levels of the university. I am most proud of my role as chair of the Department of Statistics at Rice for 14 years. As the first hire of the department, which was founded in 1987, I have had the unique opportunity to work along with my colleagues to lead and develop this department to the international stature it has today. Our department is enriched by path-breaking research and educational programs including several interdisciplinary programs. Several programs that I helped initiate include programs that span multiple institutions. We are all very proud of what we have been able to collectively achieve.

In addition to my leadership of the department, I am the founding and current director of the Rice Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES). CoFES serves as a focal point for engineering-centered research and education in quantitative finance. We established an endowed conference namely the Eubank Conference on Real World Markets, held each April. Through CoFES, I lead a popular undergraduate Financial Computation and Modeling (FCAM) minor to support the quantitative finance curriculum for the broader Rice community, hold ongoing weekly discussion groups related to quantitative finance, and maintain an active statistical finance research program. Often CoFES research is collaborative with faculty in economics, finance, and computer science.

Together with Loren Hopkins and Lauren Stadler, I am working with collaborators at Rice, the Houston Health Department, and the Houston Department of Public Works to conduct ongoing testing and analysis of the city’s wastewater treatment system to track COVID-19 and variants of concern, mpox, and influenza. In August 2022, Houston Wastewater Epidemiology was named a National Wastewater Surveillance System Center of Excellence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Studies have shown evidence of predictive metrics of infection dynamics and disease prevalence can be tracked in near-real-time with geographic resolution. The dashboard that displays wastewater virus levels was launched on September 22, 2021.

From 2016-2022, I augmented my Rice leadership and research portfolio to include the development of the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform, a permanent data repository for the greater Houston region. With generous funding from Houston Endowment, I led the effort to pull together and curate research-ready data for the purposes of furthering the growth of Houston and bettering the lives of its residents. All data is geocoded allowing easy integration across disparate data sets, thereby expanding the urban questions that can be scientifically answered.

In recent years, I served as chair of the Graduate Council, as a member of the Data Science+X steering and hiring committee, and for the first three years led the Rice Academy of Fellows. I also served on the Conflict of Interest and Commitment Committee. For previous leadership roles at Rice please see my CV.

More broadly in the statistics community, I serve as president of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and am an Accredited Professional Statistician®. I have also served on the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) and on the Board of Trustees for the NSF Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). I have served as president of the Southern Regional Council on Statistics, and as an elected representative to numerous sections and councils of ASA. I recently served on the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board on Hydraulic Fracturing Research Advisory Panel. Locally in Houston, I interface with city officials, Houston-based research groups, and community organizations related to air quality and health.