A prominent statistician, Dr. Roderick Little is Richard D. Remington Distinguished University Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, and chaired the Biostatistics Department from 2007-2009 and 1993-2001. He served as inaugural Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau from 2010 to 2013. Prior to his faculty appointment at Michigan, he was Professor in the Department of Biomathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles; Research Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau (1982-83); Expert Consultant at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Scientific Associate at the World Fertility Survey; and Research Associate (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Statistics, University of Chicago. He was Coordinating and Applications Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 1992-1994, and has served as a member of the Committee on National Statistics and a number of other National Research Council committees. He recently chaired a panel on the treatment of missing data in clinical trials. He has over 200 publications, notably on methods for the analysis of data with missing values and model-based survey inference, and the application of statistics to diverse scientific areas, including medicine, public health, demography, economics, psychiatry, aging and the environment. In 2005, Dr. Little is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and received the Wilks' Memorial Award from the American Statistical Association for his research contributions.
Swastina Shrestha is a Masters student in the Biostatistics Department at the UM School of Public Health. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2013 with a major in Biological Sciences and a minor in Statistics. Prior to returning to study, she worked for two years as a clinical research coordinator in an Orthopedics research group in Boston.