Small Area Estimation and the Future of Survey Research | RTI Panel Discussion Webinar

Marcus Berzofsky is a senior research statistician and RTI Fellow who has focused on survey sampling and methodology while at RTI International. Currently, Dr. Berzofsky works on studies for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) as well as several state governments and universities. He is the Principal Investigator on the NCS-X NIBRS Estimation project whose aim is to develop imputation and estimation methods to provide national- and state-level estimates data from the National Incident-Based Report System – the nation’s administrative data source of crimes reported to the police. Additionally, he is Project Direct on the Administration for Community Living’s Small Area Estimation and Geospatial Analysis Project, which aims to produce estimates of services provided to older Americans at lower levels of geography (e.g., state, county) than their surveys currently allow. Furthermore, Dr. Berzofsky works on the Ohio Medicaid Assessment Survey for Ohio State University, which is a general population survey of Ohio residents estimating access to health care and health care needs.

Prof. Partha Lahiri is a Professor of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland College Park (UMD). He served as the JPSM Director from January 2021 through June 2025. Prior to joining UMD, Prof. Lahiri was the Milton Mohr Professor of Statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Professor Lahiri is serving as the President of the International Association of Survey Statisticians during 2025 – 2027. His research interests include survey statistics, Bayesian statistics, statistical data integration, and small-area estimation. He has published over 85 papers in peer-reviewed journals, delivered 20 plenary/keynote presentations and over 90 invited talks in professional meetings worldwide. He has served on several advisory committees including the U.S. Census Bureau Advisory Committee of Professional Associations (chair in 2006) and a U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel and served as consultant/advisor for international organizations such as the United Nations Statistics Division and the World Bank. Prof. Lahiri is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He received the 2021 SAE Award at the 63rd World Statistics Congress Satellite Meeting on Small Area Estimation in recognition of his lifetime contributions to small area estimation research. More recently, Prof. Lahiri was awarded the Neyman Medal at a joint session of the 3rd Congress of Polish Statistics and the 2022 Conference of the International Association of Official Statistics held in Krakow, Poland, for outstanding contributions to the development of statistical sciences. 

Benmei Liu, PhD, is a mathematical statistician in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), where she advises on survey design and analysis, initiates and collaborates on research projects, and serves as a program director for NIH grants and contracts. Her primary research interests include small area estimation for cancer-related measures, imputation methods for complex survey data, Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling, joinpoint regression for complex survey data, and record-linkage research. At NCI, she has led several applied small area estimation projects in collaboration with colleagues from NCHS, CDC, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Prior to joining NCI, she worked as a sampling statistician at Westat for 7+ years, where she was involved in a wide range of projects, including small area estimation research. 

She holds a PhD in Survey Methodology from the University of Maryland and has authored or coauthored a broad range of papers published in statistical, medical, and public health journals. She was recently elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Outside of NCI, she currently serves as President of the Washington Statistical Society and is a member of the NASA Independent Expert Review Panel for NASA’s Community Response Tests of the X-59 QueSST aircraft during 2024–2026. 

Matt Williams is a Senior Research Statistician at RTI International. Dr. Williams has over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and 30 government reports on topics including statistical modelling, survey methodology, privacy, time series, and lifetime data analysis with applications to public health, scientific education and workforce development, agriculture, ecology, and business statistics. Matt has over a decade of experience in the federal government, including an executive detail as the Acting Chief Statistician for the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. After leaving the federal government, Dr. Williams has served on advisory roles such as an ad-hoc reviewer for the National Institute for Standards and Technology, ad-hoc panel member for the National Academies’ Committee on National Statistics, and a member of the technical advisory committee for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Stephanie Zimmer is a senior research statistician at RTI. She is an expert in survey sampling and has helped develop sampling designs for several national in-person surveys. Her work at RTI includes in sample design, data management, analysis, and weighting. She likes to find a way to explain complex statistical work such as small area estimation to audiences who are not statisticians so they can understand why it is important. Prior to joining RTI, she completed her doctorate in Statistics at Iowa State University, where she worked in the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology researching multivariate stratification algorithms. Outside of RTI, Dr. Zimmer is an active member of R-Ladies RTP. She is a Council of Sections Representative (2025-2027) for the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Zimmer is also an active member of the North Carolina chapter of the American Statistical Association.