Dr. Catherine A. “Kate” Calder is a statistician and data scientist, currently serving as the Chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1999 and completed her Ph.D. in statistics at Duke University in 2003.
Prior to her tenure at UT Austin, which began in 2019, Dr. Calder spent 16 years at The Ohio State University, where she was a professor in the Department of Statistics and co-directed the Mathematical Biosciences Institute from 2018 to 2019. Her research interests encompass spatial statistics, Bayesian modeling and computation, and statistical network analysis, with applications across environmental, social, and health sciences. Dr. Calder’s contributions to the field have been recognized by her election as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2014 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.