ISU alumna Sallie Keller, now a professor of statistics at Virginia Tech University, will present a lecture about using big data at the city level for policy improvements Tuesday night.

Keller, who directs the Social and Decision Analytics Lab at Virginia Tech, will discuss how communities can repurpose municipal and external data sources to support data-informed policy development. 

The annual Data-Driven Science Distinguished Lecture, titled “Harnessing Big Data to Build Resilient Communities,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium in Howe Hall. 

Before her current role, Keller has held faculty and administrative appointments at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada; Rice University; and Kansas State University.

She has also served as director of the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., head of the statistical sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and program director at the National Science Foundation. Keller has a Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State and is a recipient of the university’s John V. Atanasoff Research and Discovery Award.

More information about Keller is available at lectures.iastate.edu. 

The lecture is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Committee on Lectures.