Keller-McNulty to Lead Engineering School

Sallie Keller-McNulty has been named the new dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. She formerly served as group leader for the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Keller-McNulty succeeds C. Sidney Burrus, who retired after seven years as dean but will continue teaching, writing, and working with Rice’s Connexions project.

“Choosing as an academic dean a group leader at Los Alamos may seem an out-of-the-box choice,” says Rice president David W. Leebron. “However, engineering needs out-of-the-box thinkers, and Rice and its engineering school have them. Our search committee, chaired superbly by Dean Kathleen Matthews, produced an outstanding group of finalists, and we selected the best for Rice.”

“We are thrilled to have recruited Sallie Keller-McNulty as Rice’s next dean of engineering,” adds provost Eugene Levy. “Sallie compiled a distinguished record of accomplishment and respect at Los Alamos and has built a strong reputation as an energetic and encouraging leader. She also is known for her ability to recruit and retain talented scholars.”

Keller-McNulty says she looks forward to her new position for many reasons, most of all the university’s collaborative culture and, in particular, the way the engineering school works closely with the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and the Texas Medical Center.

“Rice is such a preeminent institution—not just because of its undergraduate education but also because of its fabulous research programs,” she says. “Rice is leading the way in making interdisciplinary science a reality, and I’m a strong advocate for that as the way to move science forward in this century.”

Keller-McNulty will join Matthews, dean of the university’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences, in making Rice the only major research university with women deans in both science and engineering.

Keller-McNulty has served in her current position at Los Alamos since 1998. Under her leadership, the size of the Statistical Sciences Group increased to more than 40 staff members from 13, and the budget quadrupled. She also established a thriving visiting faculty program, with several renowned statisticians taking their sabbaticals at the laboratory.

Before joining the Los Alamos group, Keller-McNulty was professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Statistics at Kansas State University. She held several other positions at KSU, where she started working in 1985, and she also held a joint research fellowship of the American Statistical Association, National Science Foundation, and Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1996 to 1997. She served as program director for statistics and probability in the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the National Science Foundation from 1994 to 1996. She was an assistant professor in the mathematics department at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro from 1983 to 1985.

Keller-McNulty earned her PhD in statistics from Iowa State University and her bachelor and master degrees in mathematics from the University of South Florida. She is the author of more than 60 statistical science publications and is co-author of the 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.

She has chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and recently served on three other National Research Council committees. She currently is chair of a National Academy panel study on modeling and simulation for defense transformation. Keller-McNulty is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), recipient of the prestigious ASA Founders Award, and recently was elected president of the ASA. She is an associate editor of Statistical Science and has served as associate editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics and the Journal of the American Statistical Association and serves on several national advisory committees.