Sallie Keller-McNulty Ph.D.
Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, Professor of Statistics

Dr. Sallie Keller-McNulty is the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, Professor of Statistics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is Fellow and President of the American Statistical Society (ASA) and one of the nation’s foremost experts in applied and theoretical statistics.

Prior to joining Rice in 2005, she was the Group Leader for the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1998-2005). During this tenure, Dr. Keller-McNulty tripled the size of the group (from 13 staff members to over 40) and quadrupled the budget. She also established a thriving visiting faculty program, with several renowned statisticians taking their sabbaticals at the Laboratory. Prior to her move to Los Alamos, Dr. Keller-McNulty was Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Statistics, Kansas State University (KSU). She was on the KSU faculty from 1985 to 1998, where in addition to her position in the Statistics Department, she served as Director of the Statistical Design and Analysis Unit for the KSU Institute of Social and Behavioral Research (1990-1998) and was an Adjunct Professor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department (1989-1995). From 1983 to 1985 she was an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of North Carolina- Greensboro.

Her national service includes serving as chair of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel study on Modeling and Simulation for Defense Transformation (2004–2006), chair of the NAS Committee of Applied and Theoretical Statistics (2001-2003), and service on three other National Research Council committees: the Board of Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications; National Research Council Panel reviewing NIST Information Technology Laboratory; and the Committee on National Statistics on the Research on Future Census Methods. She is a former Program Director for Statistics and Probability, Division of Mathematical Sciences, the National Science Foundation (1994-1996), where she received the Director’s Award for Outstanding Program Management in 1996.

She was recently named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Keller-McNulty was a joint ASA, National Science Foundation and Bureau of Labor Statistics Research Fellow from 1996 to 1997. She is recipient of the ASA’s prestigious Founder’s Award. Editorial positions include serving as an Associate Editor of Statistical Science, the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Dr. Keller-McNulty has over sixty statistical science publications and has co-authored a book, Introduction to Probability and Systems Modeling. Her areas of research are uncertainty quantification, computational and graphical statistics and related software and modeling techniques, and data access and confidentiality. In her research and as Group Leader at Los Alamos, Dr. Keller-McNulty has developed a great appreciation for the need for interdisciplinary research to find solutions for today’s complex problems.

Dr. Keller-McNulty received her Ph.D in Statistics from Iowa State University of Science and Technology and her BS and MS in mathematics from University of South Florida.