Jean Opsomer

Overview

Jean Opsomer, PhD, is a Vice President and a senior statistician with 3 decades of experience applying statistical methods to answer research questions. He joined Westat in 2018 as a Vice President and has worked on a variety of projects across the company, including the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study (PATH Study) and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients; health-related projects, such as the National SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence Studies in Blood Donors; and human services–related projects, including an outcome evaluation study of Healthy Start grantees.

Opsomer is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has served on multiple panels of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and is a current member of the Statistics Canada Advisory Committee on Statistical Methods. He is Associate Editor for Survey Methodology and for Statistical Science. 

Previously, Opsomer was a faculty member in the Departments of Statistics at Colorado State University and Iowa State University. The author or coauthor of more than 90 peer-reviewed articles, he has developed statistical methods for calibration in surveys, model building, variable selection, and evaluation. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He is the recipient of the Carver Medal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Founders Award of the American Statistical Association.

In recognition of his contributions to the field, Opsomer has been named a Westat Senior Statistical Fellow and co-chairs the Statistical Fellows Committee, which provides consultation on important survey statistics issues and addresses recent advances in applied statistics.

Education

• PhD, Operations Research , Cornell University
• MBA, Finance, University of Chicago
• MS, Management Engineering, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium