BigSurv2023 Scientific Committee
Ana Lucía Córdova Cazar is a professor at the School of Business at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She obtained her PhD and Master of Science in the area of Survey Research and Methodology from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (USA). Additionally, thanks to the Chevening scholarship, she earned a Master of Arts in Political Economy from the University of Essex (United Kingdom).
Her academic interests include survey design and analysis, opinion measurement, applied analysis of social behavior, questionnaire design, multivariate and multilevel statistical analysis, and structural equation modeling. Her research focuses on big data and social sciences, politics, data on the use of time, and the quality of data collected through surveys.
Dr. Amelia Burke-Garcia, Program Area Director, Public Health, NORC, USA
Dr. Burke-Garcia is a seasoned health communications professional with nearly 20 years of experience in health communication program planning, implementation and evaluation, with specific expertise in developing and evaluating digital and social media communication and research programs. At NORC, she leads the organization's Digital Strategy and Outreach Program Area, where she designs and implements strategies that leverage the power of digital media to influence behavior. In this role, Dr. Burke-Garcia develops new digital and mobile data collection methodologies and communication solutions. She has been overseeing the award-winning How Right Now/Que Hacer Ahora campaign since 2020, which aims to increase people’s ability to cope and be resilient amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently leads two grants focused on exploring vaccine hesitancy amongst communities of color that build on her earlier work exploring messages and motivations of vaccine-hesitant or refusing social media influencers (findings from which were published in Vaccine in 2020). Over the course of her career, Dr. Burke-Garcia has spearheaded some of the most innovative communication programs and studies on a variety of health topics, including designing a targeted social media intervention with mommy bloggers to help social media users lower their risk for breast cancer, and leveraging MeetUp groups and the Waze mobile application to move people to action around flu vaccination and HIV testing, respectively. She is the author of the books, Influencing Health: A Comprehensive Guide to Working with Social media influencers, and Communicating Through a Pandemic: A Chronicle of Experiences, Lessons Learned, and a Vision for the Future. She has been highlighted by the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, for her work in honor of Women’s History Month and has been named to VeryWellHealth.com’s list of 10 Modern Female Innovators Shaking Up Health Care.
Trent D. Buskirk, Ph.D. is the Novak Family Distinguished Professor of Data Science and outgoing Chair of the Applied Statistics and Operations Research Department at Bowling Green State University. Dr. Buskirk is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and his research interests include big data quality, recruitment methods through social media, the use of big data and machine learning methods for health, social and survey science design and analysis, mobile and smartphone survey designs and in methods for calibrating and weighting nonprobability samples and fairness in AI models and interpretable ML methods. Recently, Trent served as the President of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research in 2016, the Conference Chair for AAPOR in 2018 and is currently part of the scientific committee for the BigSurv23 conference. Trent also serves as an Associate Editor for Methods for the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. When Trent is not geeking out over data science, big data or survey methodology, you can find him playing a competitive game of Pickleball!
Ellie Graeden, PhD is a Research Professor with the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security. Dr. Graeden spent the last decade establishing and leading a private company, Talus Analytics, in designing and building data products to solve challenging problems at the intersection of policy, science, and strategy. She now leads the health intelligence research pillar at the Center, including a team of data scientists, where she uses data architecture and engineering to address challenges in global data sharing for health response and investment. Dr. Graeden has supported federal and state governments to coordinate data-driven decision making for emergency management, including extensive work during COVID-19 response. Her work helping lead the analysis of policy and investments in global health security have been used by the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention Meeting of Experts, the Global Fund, and the G20. She and her team designed and developed data systems to collect and analyze policy data for HIV and COVID-19 and data on health care capacity for CDC. Her most recent work is focused on developing graph-based machine learning models to quantify global disease risk and to evaluate the policy environment for data sharing for health response. Dr. Graeden earned her undergraduate degree in microbiology from Oregon State University and her doctorate in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Craig A. Hill has been with RTI International for over 20 years and currently serves as Senior Vice President in RTI International’s Social, Statistical, and Environmental Sciences business unit.
Prior to joining RTI, Dr. Hill held a variety of roles at NORC at the University of Chicago, including Research Vice President, and at Medrock, Inc. (Boulder, CO), where he was Vice President and Director of Operations. From 1982 to 1987, he held positions in a variety of academic research and teaching roles.
Dr. Hill received his PhD in quantitative methods from the Political Science department at the University of New Orleans and an MA (1984) from the same institution. He also holds a BA degree in Political Science from Northern Illinois University (1978).
Dr. Hill’s second book, Big Data Meets Survey Science: A Collection of Innovative Methods hit print in November 2020. He also co-edited Social Media, Sociality, and Survey Research (Wiley, 2013), and co-authored two chapters in that book. His papers have appeared in Evaluation and the Health Professions, Health Affairs, Inquiry, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Official Statistics, and Social Science Computer Review, among others. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Dr. Don Jang, Vice President, Statistics and Data Science, NORC at the University of Chicago, USA
Don has over 25 years of experience managing and directing large-scale national federal statistical projects and methodological research associated with federal statistics programs. Don leads a group of statisticians and data scientists with expertise in design and analytic techniques necessary for social science research. He helped his team establish roles in complex sample designs, experimental and observational study designs, data collection and processing, and statistical inference. In the wake of big data and data analytics, he led his group to augment their roles by expanding modern capabilities in data analytics, advanced statistical computing, Bayesian modeling, data mining, and machine learning. As research embraces more timely and cost-efficient data to include newer research methodologies, such as data analytics and rapid-cycle evaluation, so have the services and resources offered by the Data Science group he leads. His vision to bring data scientific and statistical values to evidence-based social science research and informed decision-making has continued to be realized under his leadership.
Don is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). He served on the ASA board of directors from 2018 to 2020. He served as Chair-elect for the Survey Research Method Section of ASA for the 2024 term to eventually serve as Chair. He also served as President of the Korean International Statistical Society from 2019 to 2020. He was a board member of Hope Nicaragua from 2007 to 2018.
Dr. Stas Kolenikov, Principal Statistician, NORC at the University of Chicago, USA
Stas Kolenik
ov is Principal Statistician at NORC at the University of Chicago. He works on statistical aspects of survey data collection, including sampling design, weighting, replicate variance estimation, nonsampling error analysis, as well as on data science aspects of data processing and analysis, such as reproducible workflows, version control of statistical code, package management and package development. Prior to joining NORC, Stas had worked at Abt Associates, The World Bank Group, University of Missouri, Columbia, and Centre for Economic and Financial Research (Moscow, Russia). Beyond survey statistics, Stas has published in the areas of structural equation modeling, environmental statistics, and economics of income distribution. Stas has been contributing to organization of all of the previous BigSurv meetings, including BigSurv18 in Barcelona, Spain, and BigSurv20 at Utrecht, Netherlands, held virtually due to COVID.
Peter Lugtig is an associate professor at the department of Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht University, where he specializes in survey methodology, which includes inferences using a mix of survey data and big data and the modelling of survey errors, and the use of sensor technology in smartphones.
Next to his research, he has a passion for teaching and thus is involved in several Bachelor’s, Master’s and post-graduate courses about statistics and survey methodology.
Dr. Nan Zhang, Professor of Management, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, USA
Dr. Nan
Zhang is a Professor of Management at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. Dr. Zhang started his academic career as a computer scientist, receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University before serving as an Assistant, Associate, and then Professor of Computer Science at George Washington University, and a Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He also served as a Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) division of the National Science Foundation (NSF), in which capacity he co-chaired the federal interagency working group on information privacy research.
Dr. Zhang’s current research focuses on the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and the integration of machine learning and data analytics in social sciences. His research on these topics has been supported by federal agencies such as the NSF, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Army Research Office (ARO), and companies such as Amazon and Meta. He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM SIGMOD, and a guest associate editor for Management Information Systems (MIS) Quarterly and European Physical Journal (EPJ) Data Science.
Dr. Adam Eck, Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, Oberlin College, USA
Adam Eck is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Data Science Integrative Concentration at Oberlin College where he leads the Social Intelligence Lab. Adam's research interests include interdisciplinary applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve real-world problems, such as data science and machine learning for improving data collection and analysis in the computational social sciences (e.g., Survey Informatics) and public health, as well as decision making for intelligent agents and multiagent systems in complex, uncertain environments.
Julián Maya, Assistant Professor, School of Business, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador
Julian Maya holds an MSc in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media from the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, as well as a degree in Business Administration from Universidad San Francisco de Quito. He works as an assistant professor at the Business School of USFQ, where he also holds the role of academic coordinator for the Business Analytics minor. Julian is an interdisciplinary professional with experience as a developer and technology team leader for startups and corporations. His previous research was on human computer interaction for full-body interactive learning environments.
Antje Kirchner holds a PhD in statistics and is an Independent Researcher and an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Her research addresses challenges in survey methodology, including how to reduce nonresponse bias using adaptive/responsive designs and assessing the quality of survey data.
She is a founding member and co-organizer of the “Big Data Meets Survey Science” conference series and serves/d various professional associations (e.g., AAPOR, ESRA, ASA).
Dr. Lilli Japec, Senior Scientific Advisor, Statistics Sweden, Sweden
Lilli Japec, Ph.D. in Statistics, has over 30 years of experience in statistics production, survey methodology and quality management. She has held various positions at Statistics Sweden such as Director of Research and Development and Quality Director. Currently she is Senior Scientific Advisor at Statistics Sweden and Executive Editor in Chief for the Journal of Official Statistics. Dr Japec has authored and co-authored book chapters and research papers on survey quality topics. She is the co-editor of two monographs published by Wiley, “Advances in Telephone Survey Methodology” in 2008 and more recently ”Big Data Meets Survey Science-A Collection of Innovative Methods” in 2021. She has chaired and been member of numerous international task forces e.g., she co-chaired the American Association for Public Opinion Research's (AAPOR) Task Force on Big Data. Dr Japec has served as Scientific Secretary of the International Association of Survey Statistician and as board member of the Swedish Institute for Quality (SIQ). SIQ is the national quality foundation responsible for the Swedish Quality Award. In 2021 Dr Japec was one of the recipients of the AAPOR’s Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award.