Kathy Ensor

Katherine Bennett Ensor is an American statistician interested in spatiotemporal data, environmental statistics, financial modeling, and risk management. She is the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics and Director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems at Rice University. She also oversees the development of the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform, a resource for the greater Houston area. She served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 1999 through 2013. In 2020, she was named the 117th President American Statistical Association (ASA) and served as ASA Vice President from 2018 to 2019. 
Ensor earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from Arkansas State University in 1981 and 1982. She completed her Ph.D. in statistics in 1986 from Texas A&M University; her dissertation, supervised by H. Joseph Newton, was "Some Results in Autoregressive Modeling". She has been on the Rice faculty since 1987.
Ensor's results have included the discovery of a correlation between ozone and heart attacks, and of geographic patterns in severe asthma attacks in schoolchildren.
She became a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2000, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013.