Karen Kafadar is Commonwealth Professor of Statistics at the University of Virginia and the current chair of the UVA Department of Statistics. She recently fulfilled her term as 114th president of the American Statistical Association. Karen's professional accomplishments and activities are vast: she has been editor-in-chief of Technometrics and served as president of the International Association for Statistical Computing; she was editor for JASA's Review Section and is currently biology and genetics editor for the Annals for Applied Statistics; she chairs the ASA Committee on Statistics in Forensic Science, serves on the Forensic Science Standards Board, and is active on National Academy of Sciences committees; she has been on the National Institute of Statistical Sciences Board of Trustees since 2010.
Professor Kafadar is a leading exponent of exploratory data analysis. Her research also focuses on robust methods; characterization of uncertainty in the physical, chemical, biological, and engineering sciences; and methodology for the analysis of screening trials, which has resulted in awards from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the ASA, and the American Society for Quality. Karen earned her Stanford bachelor's degree in math and coterminal master's degree in statistics in 1975. Her adviser in the Statistics Department was Brad Efron; her PhD in statistics from Princeton was completed with John Tukey.