Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar

Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar
Senior Statistician; Head, RAND Statistics Group
Off Site Office

Education

Ph.D. in statistics, Pennsylvania State University; M.A. in statistics, Pennsylvania State University; B.S. in mathematics and computer science, Albright College

Media Resources

This researcher is available for interviews.

To arrange an interview, contact the RAND Office of Media Relations at (310) 451-6913, or email media@rand.org.

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Overview

Madhumita (Bonnie) Ghosh-Dastidar is head of the Statistics Group and a senior statistician at the RAND Corporation. Her areas of policy are health and social and economic well-being and her work includes evaluations of neighborhood-level interventions, randomized trails to assess the effect of interventions to improve depression and adherence to treatment among HIV patients, and general topics in population health. Her statistical expertise includes study design, sampling, survey methods, evaluations, missing data, longitudinal and multilevel modeling. Her current interests center around multiple NIH studies leveraging quasi-experimental design to evaluate the effect of neighborhood-level change on residents' diet, sleep, and cardiovascular health. Ghosh-Dastidar's experience includes being lead statistician for large-scale surveys on sexual assault and armed services in the military, and the Singapore mental health study to assess national prevalence. She was elected as the 2024 President of the American Statistical Association (ASA).  She is a fellow of the ASA, and statistician for two studies receiving the RAND President’s Choice Award (years 2014, 2015). The ASA Committee on Women in Statistics celebrated her work in statistics and data science during Women's History Month in March 2019. Ghosh-Dastidar received her Ph.D. and M.A. in statistics from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Albright College, Reading, PA.

Concurrent Non-RAND Positions

2023 President Elect, American Statistical Association

Recent Projects

  • Environment's Impact on Children’s Diet, Activity & Obesity: A Natural Experiment
  • Does a New Supermarket Improve Dietary Behaviors of Low-income African Americans?
  • Neighborhood and Family Effects on Disparities in Chronic Disease
  • Survey of New Orleans Displaced Residents Displaced by Hurricane Katrina
  • Women, Neighborhoods and Coronary Heart Disease: A Perspective Study

Selected Publications

Ghosh-Dastidar, B., Elliot, M.N., Haviland, A., Karoly, L.A., "Composite Estimates from Incomplete and Complete Frames for Minimum-MSE Estimation in a Rare Population: An Application to Families with Young Children," Public Opinion Quarterly, 73(4), 2009

Ghosh-Dastidar, B., and Schafer, J.L., "Outlier Detection and Editing Procedures for Continuous Multivariate Survey Data," Journal of Official Statistics, 22(3), 2006

Ghosh-Dastidar, B., and Schafer, J.L., "Multiple Edit/Multiple Imputation for Continuous Multivariate Survey Data," Journal of the American Statistical Association, 98(464), 2003

Rendall, M., Ghosh-Dastidar, B., Weden, M., Nazarov, Z., "Multiple Imputation for Combined-Survey Estimation with Incomplete Regressors in One but not Both Surveys," Sociological Methods and Research (forthcoming)

Cantor, J., Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, Gerald Hunter, Matthew Baird, Andrea S. Richardson, Tamara Dubowitz, "What is Associated with Changes in Food Security among Low-income Residents of a former Food Desert?" Nutrients , 14(24), 2022

Friedman, Esther M, Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, Teague Ruder, Daniel Siconolfi, Regina A. Shih, "Trends In Home Care Versus Nursing Home Workforce Sizes Are States Converging Or Diverging Over Time?" Health Affairs, 40(12), 2021

Honors & Awards

  • Alumnus of the Year, 2009, Department of Statistics, Pennsylvania State University
  • Fellow, 2016, American Statistical Association

Languages

Bengali

Commentary

Publications