On Wednesday, November 16, Rob Santos, the 26th director of the U.S. Census Bureau will meet with students from the Culverhouse College of Business and present an evening public lecture that is open to all.
The abstract for the lecture, to take place in Hewson Hall’s Fitzpatrick Auditorium from 7-8 p.m., is as follows:
Career paths can be quite the maze, quite the long and windy road. They can lead you away from your preferred areas of interest or imbed you in exactly what you want to do. Or they can do both if you learn to deftly navigate the inevitable opportunities and threats that arise during your trek. Drawing from a forty-year career in survey and policy research, this presentation will leverage real life experience to illuminate how one can rely on personal inner strength and resilience – your heart and soul — to advance towards your professional nirvana. Interspersed will be observations, experiences and lessons learned as the all-to-often sole Latinx/diverse voice in a fundamentally inequitable industry and society.
More about Director Santos:
Rob’s career spans more than 40 years in survey research, statistical design and analysis, and executive-level management. He previously served for fifteen years as vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute and directed its Statistical Methods Group. He was executive vice president and partner of NuStats, a social science research firm in Austin, Texas. Rob has held leadership positions in the nation’s top survey research organizations, including the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, where he served as vice president of statistics and methodology and director of survey operations; the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, as director of survey operations; and Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research, as senior study director and sampling statistician. Rob specializes in quantitative and qualitative research design, including program evaluation, needs assessments, survey methodology and survey operations. He also has expertise in demographic and administrative data, decennial censuses, social policy research and equity issues in research. Rob served as the 2021 president of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is an ASA Fellow and recipient of the ASA Founder’s Award in 2006. He was the 2014 president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and received the 2021 AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement. Santos is also an elected member to the International Statistical Institute, and he served from 2017 to 2020 as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was a longtime member of the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly.