Keynote Speakers

The SAE 2020 Program Committee is pleased to announce that the following keynote speakers presentations will be held in the beautiful scenario of Naples.


Graham Kalton

Graham Kalton retired in 2019 from positions as Senior Vice President and Senior Statistical Fellow at Westat where he had worked for 27 years. He is one of the founders of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, where he still holds a title of research professor. Prior to joining Westat, he was a research scientist at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan for 12 years, also holding titles of Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Statistics. Before that, he was Leverhulme Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Southampton and Reader in Social Statistics at the London School of Economics. Dr. Kalton has wide-ranging interests in survey methodology, and he has published on several aspects of the subject. In 1998-2000 he served as chair of a panel of the National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics that was tasked with evaluating the US Census Bureau’ s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program at a time when that program was under development.



J. Sunil Rao, Ph.D is Professor and Director of the Division of Biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences (DPHS). Previously, Dr. Rao was Professor of Biostatistics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Rao's research interests include high dimensional model selection, mixed model selection, predictive modeling, sparse bump hunting and development of statistical methods in cancer genomics. Dr. Rao teaches Generalized Linear Models in the M.S. and Ph.D. programs in Biostatistics. He is also a fellow of the American Statistical Association. J. Sunil Rao works on various aspects of modeling cancer data from high dimensional genomic data to small area estimation (estimating quantities in areas/locations where little or no direct data is collected), all the way through to modeling health disparity data. Most recently, Professor Rao has begun working in modeling pharmacogenomic data - both in trying to identify novel drug targets but also in trying to validate high throughput pharmacogenomic studies. Finally, Professor Rao has developed a number of R software modules that are used widely around the world.



Andrea Saltelli has worked on physical chemistry, environmental sciences, applied statistics, impact assessment and science for policy. His main disciplinary focus is on sensitivity analysis of model output, a discipline where statistical tools are used to interpret the output from mathematical or computational models, and on sensitivity auditing, an extension of sensitivity analysis to the entire evidence-generating process in a policy context. He has worked at the European Commission, leading between 2005 and 2015 a unit of econometrics and applied statistics. From November 2016 till June 2020 adjunct professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT) - University of Bergen (UIB). He is presently at Open Evidence Research, Open University of Catalonia. His most recent papers have tackled sensitivity analysis and auditing, the ecological footprint, the future of statistics, the rational of evidence-based policy, the crisis of science and the post-truth discussion. Andrea gives courses in sensitivity analysis, sensitivity auditing and ethics of quantification.

J. Sunil Rao, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Division of Biostatistics, has been named Interim Chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences.
He is a member of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his primary disease area of focus has been colorectal cancer — from screening for early detection, to unraveling the genomic determinants of progression, to the identification of patients who are the most likely to respond (or not respond) well to given treatments.
“Dr. Rao is an internationally respected researcher who is committed to solving important scientific questions through the development and application of new statistical methods,” said Laurence B. Gardner, M.D., Interim Dean of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “With his research collaborators, he has made fundamental discoveries for the analysis of complex data.”
These achievements include spike and slab regression for high dimensional genomic data, fence methods for mixed model selection, the observed best predictor for robust small area estimation, local sparse bump hunting for the identification of informative subgroups, classified mixed model prediction for precision medicine and, most recently, the formalization of precision disparity modeling.
Rao has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers in top statistical and scientific journals, and his research program has received uninterrupted PI funding since 2000 from the National Science Foundation and/or the National Institutes of Health. He is also a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Rao is a theme leader of the Cancer Control and Prevention Program of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, and he has been the co-Director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design component of the UM Clinical and Translational Science Institute since 2011.
After earning his B.Sc. in Biology at the University of Ottawa in 1989, M.S. in Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota in 1991, and Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of Toronto in 1994, Rao began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1994. He joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University in 1998, where he worked for the next 12 years in positions of increasing responsibility, culminating as Professor and Director of the Division of Biostatistics.
Rao joined the Miller School faculty as Professor and Director of the Division of Biostatistics in 2010. Among the achievements of the division since then has been the creation of a Ph.D. and M.S. program in Biostatistics, establishment of the Biostatistics Collaboration and Consulting Core, recruitment of seven new faculty, and a significant increase in the amount of statistical science as evidenced by important papers and a marked increase in extramural grant funding by division faculty.
As public health continues to evolve to address increasingly difficult challenges, Rao hopes to promote more interdisciplinary research across the University and his department’s five divisions: Biostatistics, Environment and Public Health, Epidemiology and Population Health, Health Services Research and Policy, and Prevention Science and Community Health. He also intends to continue to strengthen and expand graduate program offerings in the department.
Graham Kalton retired in 2019 from positions as Senior Vice President and Senior Statistical Fellow at Westat where he had worked for 27 years. He is one of the founders of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, where he still holds a title of research professor. Prior to joining Westat, he was a research scientist at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan for 12 years, also holding titles of Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Statistics. Before that, he was Leverhulme Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Southampton and Reader in Social Statistics at the London School of Economics. Dr. Kalton has wide-ranging interests in survey methodology, and he has published on several aspects of the subject. In 1998-2000 he served as chair of a panel of the National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics that was tasked with evaluating the US Census Bureau’ s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program at a time when that program was under development.
Andrea Saltelli has worked on physical chemistry, environmental sciences, applied statistics, impact assessment and science for policy. His main disciplinary focus is on sensitivity analysis of model output, a discipline where statistical tools are used to interpret the output from mathematical or computational models, and on sensitivity auditing, an extension of sensitivity analysis to the entire evidence-generating process in a policy context. He has worked at the European Commission, leading between 2005 and 2015 a unit of econometrics and applied statistics. From November 2016 till June 2020 adjunct professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (SVT) - University of Bergen (UIB). He is presently at Open Evidence Research, Open University of Catalonia. His most recent papers have tackled sensitivity analysis and auditing, the ecological footprint, the future of statistics, the rational of evidence-based policy, the crisis of science and the post-truth discussion. Andrea gives courses in sensitivity analysis, sensitivity auditing and ethics of quantification.