Dan Liao

Dan Liao is a senior research statistician and program manager in RTI’s Division of Statistical and Data Sciences. She has been engaged in innovative survey research and data science for more than 15 years. She has worked on multiple aspects of data processing and analysis for large, multistage surveys of healthcare, including cross-sectional and longitudinal sampling design, survey weighting, data editing and imputation, statistical disclosure control, and the analysis of survey data. She was the statistical lead on Mental Health Surveillance Study under National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the sampling and weighting statistician on the 5th Wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Currently, she is the sampling lead on the Mental and Substance Use Disorders Prevalence Study. She also leads multiple statistical tasks under the NCS-X NIBRS Estimation project to address challenging issues in data quality for administrate data of crime in the United States.

Dr. Liao’s statistical training in survey design and analysis is complemented with training on data collection techniques, issues related to data collection mode bias, nonresponse bias, experimental design, and questionnaire design. As a program manager, she oversees a team of statisticians on technical issues, scientific stature, and other areas of growth. Dr. Liao has published research on regression diagnostics for complex survey data, calibration weighting for unit nonresponse, combining data from multiple sources, data quality improvement, Bayesian mixture modeling, and predictive modeling.

Dr. Liao is also an active member and educator in the survey statistics community. She teaches graduate-level course on applied regression at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Her extensive professional service include positions such as, the associate editor for Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, the methodology section chair for the Washington Statistical Society and the publication officer-elect for the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association.