Carolina Franco is a principal statistician at NORC at the University of Chicago. She conducts research and consulting on the modeling of survey data and related topics and is widely recognized for her expertise in small area estimation (SAE). Before joining NORC, Carolina spent several years working at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Statistical Research and Methodology (CSRM). Carolina is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and holds several leadership appointments in the statistics community.

Fabio Spizzichino has been a Professor of Probability Theory at the University “La Sapienza” Rome, Italy, until 2018. His research interests include Probability Theory and its applications, Bayesian Statistics, Markov processes and point processes, Copulas, Dependence and Stochastic Orders, Non-negative Random Variables, Order Statistics, and Multivariate Models for Ordered Statistical Data.

Refik Soyer is a professor of decision sciences and of statistics at the George Washington University (GWU). He also serves as the director of the Institute for Integrating Statistics in Decision Sciences at GWU. He was the Mitch Blaser Distinguished Scholar in Business Analytics (2013-2018) and served as the Chair of the Department of Decision Sciences (2011-2015)

Sharon Hessney is the “curator” of graphs, feature writer and moderator for “What’s Going On In This Graph?” (WGOITGraph?). Since 2017, WGOITGraph?, a collaboration of The New York Times Learning Network and the American Statistical Association, encourages students to tease out the story from timely and engaging graphs. In addition, she administers the feature by recruiting, training and assigning more than 70 moderators who have a broad diversity by math teaching, location and expertise.