Biography

Alan F. Karr is Professor of Research in the Department of Statistics, Operations, and Data Science and Managing Director of the Data Science Institute at Temple University. He is also Senior Research Data Scientist at the Fraunhofer USA Center Mid-Atlantic, Principal of AFK Analytics, LLC, and Director Emeritus of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS). Previously, he was Director of the Center of Excellence for Complex Data Analysis (CoDA) at RTI International, Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Director of NISS, Professor of Statistics & Operations Research and Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a founding Associate Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute. Prior to moving to North Carolina in 1992, he was a tenured faculty member, chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and Associate Dean of the School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University.

He holds one patent, and is the author of three books and more than 160 scientific papers, the majority of which have co-authors from disciplines other than statistics. Karr is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, and has served on numerous editorial boards, as well as multiple study panels convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Karr’s research centers on cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations involving statistics and other fields that include software engineering, metagenomics, transportation, data integration, data quality, data confidentiality, data availability, survey methodology, education statistics, healthcare, aging, the scientific workforce, disease surveillance, and materials science. He has mentored more than 50 postdoctoral fellows.