Katherine Ensor is a leading expert in applying computational and statistical analysis to help build resilient and adaptive communities. Efforts have included tracking and forecasting issues in public health, community analytics, environmental statistics, and computational finance.
In May 2020, she began establishing and implementing the statistical system for assessing the pertinent health information from wastewater samples for SARS-CoV-2 and variants of concern. Through Houston Wastewater Epidemiology, this scope has been expanded to include more communicable illnesses.
From 2016-2022, Ensor led the Kinder Institute Urban Data Platform (UDP), a secure data repository and an analytical computing environment that provides research-ready urban data for the Greater Houston Area. The platform facilitates cross-disciplinary research and community studies to advance knowledge and information about Houston's people, government, and built environment. UDP studies have provided information on COVID-19, evictions, flooding impacts and more.
Ensor has been a faculty member of Rice’s Department of Statistics for over 35 years. Her research is highly cited and has been published in more than 90 journal publications. In addition to developing statistical techniques to answer large-dimension problems in public health and environmental science, she specializes in the application of time-series data to analyze problems in finance. She is the director of Rice’s Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES).
Ensor is the 117th president of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and a 2024 recipient of ASA's Founders Award. She is a fellow of ASA and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was chair of Rice’s Department of Statistics from 1999 to 2013. She has led the development of many major education and research initiatives at Rice, including the joint Ph.D. program between Rice and MD Anderson Cancer Center, the first professional master’s program in statistics in the Houston area, and the undergraduate minor in Financial Computation and Modeling (FCAM) with the Department of Economics.