Richard Valliant is a Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and the Joint Program for Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Biostatistics and an MS in statistics from Cornell University. He has over 45 years of experience in survey sampling, estimation theory, and statistical computing. He was formerly an Associate Director at Westat and a  athematical statistician with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).