Ron Fricker

Ronald D. Fricker, Jr. is the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Virginia Tech and a Professor of Statistics. He joined Virginia Tech in 2015 as the Head of the Department of Statistics and served as the Interim Dean of the College of Science from 2021 until June of 2022. Prior to Virginia Tech, he was a faculty member in the Operations Research Department of the Naval Postgraduate School and, before that, a Senior Statistician at the RAND Corporation and the Associate Director of the RAND National Defense Research Institute.

Dr. Fricker’s research is focused on studying the performance of various statistical methods for use in disease surveillance and statistical process control methodologies more generally.  He is the author of more than 100 papers, monographs, and technical reports and three books:

• Introduction to Statistical Methods for Biosurveillance published by Cambridge University Press
• Monitoring the Health of Populations by Tracking Disease Outbreaks: Saving Humanity from the Next Plague by CRC Press, which he co-authored with Steve Rigdon (St. Louis University) at the outset of the COVID pandemic
  
• Introduction to Probability and Statistics for Data Scientists he coauthored with Steve Rigdon and Doug Montgomery (ASU) to be published by Cambridge University Press

Dr. Fricker holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Statistics from Yale University, an M.S. in Operations Research from The George Washington University, and a bachelor's degree from the United States Naval Academy. Upon graduation from the Naval Academy, he served as a surface warfare officer in the United States Navy. Dr. Fricker is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.