Appendix B
Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff
BRUCE GARDNER (Chair) is professor and interim dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Maryland. Previously he was a faculty member at Texas A&M University and North Carolina State University. During 1975-1977, he was a senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, covering agricultural issues during the time of the first Soviet grain trade agreement and the development of the 1977 Farm Bill in the Carter administration. During 1989-1992, he was assistant secretary of agriculture and the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His writings have concentrated on agricultural commodity and trade policy, marketing, and farm income distribution and have received three awards for excellence from the American Agricultural Economics Association. He is a fellow of the association and was its president in 1999. He has a B.S. in agricultural science and economics from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
WALTER J. ARMBRUSTER is president of the Farm Foundation in Oak Brook, Illinois. He has previously worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a staff economist involved with research in marketing efficiency, institutions, and policy issues. He is past president and a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and is secretary/treasurer of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He has served on the advisory board of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in agricultural economics from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Oregon State University.
DAVID BINDER is a consultant on survey design and was previously director general of the methodology branch of Statistics Canada. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has written extensively on the theory and methods for the analysis of complex survey data. At the National Research Council, he served on the Panel on the Research on Future Census Methods. He is a past president of the Statistical Society of Canada. He has a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Imperial College, London.
RAY D. BOLLMAN is chief of research and analysis of the agriculture division of Statistics Canada. He also serves as adjunct research professor at the University of Manitoba. He has written extensively on rural development issues and has analyzed data sets on household expenditure patterns for rural families. He has B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Manitoba and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Toronto.
CYNTHIA Z.F. CLARK is an executive director at the U.K. Office for National Statistics leading the Methodology Directorate. Previously she served as associate director for methodology and standards at the U.S. Census Bureau where she led the large scale evaluation of the 2000 census, established an administrative records research program, initiated a framework for quality standards, and developed a usability laboratory. She has 13 years experience with agriculture surveys and censuses as a division director at the National Agricultural Statistics Service and research manager in the Agriculture Division of the Census Bureau. Her professional work focuses on survey and census methodology, operations, and research; official statistics; survey technologies; privacy and confidentiality; and statistical training in the workplace. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from Iowa State University.
FREDERICK CONRAD is research associate professor of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research generally involves identifying and reducing survey measurement error by applying ideas and methods from cognitive science. His current research is focused on adaptive user interfaces in web surveys, understanding and misunderstanding survey questions, estimation processes, evaluation of questionnaire pretesting methods, and interviewer-respondent interaction. He has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago.
ANI L. KATCHOVA is assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, where she teaches applied statistical methods, and advanced agricultural economics. Her recent publications have made extensive use of microdata from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey, and her research has focused on agricultural finance with a focus on farm financial performance. She has a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the Ohio State University.
ARTHUR KENNICKELL is a senior economics and unit head for the Survey of Consumer Finances of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He has been on the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System since 1984. His areas of expertise are data collection and estimation methodology, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
CATHERINE KLING is professor of economics in the Department of Economics at Iowa State University. She also serves as head of the resource and environmental policy division in Center for Agricultural and Rural Development there. She has been on the staff of Iowa State University since 1993. She serves as associate editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Her research has focused on issues of agricultural environmental and resource economics. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland and a B.B.A. in business and economics from the University of Iowa.
CARYN KUEBLER (Associate Program Officer) is an associate program officer for the Committee on National Statistics. Previously she worked for the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center on a nationally scaled research project measuring the relationship between the size and scope of a region’s creative sector and its economic growth potential. Her research interests include measuring consumer debt burden and income inequality, economic development, and cultural policy, including access to and protection of cultural and natural resources. She has a B.S. from Syracuse University and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago.
JEAN OPSOMER is director of the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology and associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. His research interests and professional practice include nonparametric regression; developing advanced statistical tools to increase understanding of environmental processes, as well as the human impact on the environment; and the design and estimation for the National Resources Inventory survey. He has an M.S. in management engineering from
Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University.
BOBBY R. PHILLS is professor and director of the small fruits program at Florida A&M University. He has directed several research projects for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and serves as a member of the advisory board of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. He is a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources. He has a B.S. in horticulture from Southern University and A&M College, an M.S. in horticulture from Louisiana State University, and a Ph.D. in horticulture/plant breeding from Louisiana State University.
THOMAS J. PLEWES (Study Director) is a senior program officer for the Committee on National Statistics and was study director for its Panel to Review Research and Development Statistics at the National Science Foundation. Previously he was associate commissioner for employment and unemployment statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and served as chief of the U.S. Army Reserve. He was a member of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has a B.A. in economics from Hope College and an M.A. in economics from the George Washington University.
STANLEY PRESSER is professor in the Sociology Department and the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. His research has focused on the interface between social psychology and survey measurement, questionnaire design and testing, the accuracy of survey responses, and ethical issues stemming from the use of human subjects. He is a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. At the National Research Council, he served on the Committee to Review the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ Survey Programs. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.
ROBERT D. TORTORA is chief methodologist of the Gallup Organization. Prior to joining Gallup, he was associate director for statistical design, methodology, and standards at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. In that position, he led the design of the 2000 census; he was responsible for the statistical and survey methodology for all Census Bureau programs, as well as the development of statistical and survey standards. Prior to joining the Census Bureau staff, he was director of the research and applications division of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. He also serves as adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Nebraska and of applied
statistics at George Mason University. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has a B.S. in mathematics from Youngstown State University, an M.S. in mathematical statistics from the Catholic University of America, and a Ph.D. in probability and statistics from Bowling Green State University.
MICHAEL K. WOHLGENANT is William Neal Reynolds distinguished professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University. His specialty is development of economic models of agricultural marketing, policy, and price-analysis problems. He has developed economic models to understand farm-to-retail price linkages, consumer preferences, and the effects of advertising. He has had extensive commodity experience, including work on applied price and marketing problems for cotton, dairy, beef, pork, grapes, sugar, tobacco, wine, and horticultural crops. He has extensive experience in modeling the impact of generic advertising on farm-level returns to producers. He has also made contributions to understanding the allocation of check-off funds between research and advertising. He was an innovator of the equilibrium displacement modeling approach, which is used extensively in policy and welfare analysis. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in economics and agricultural economics from Montana State University and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of California at Davis.
