I am a professor in statistics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Prior to this appointment I was a statistician at RAND and head of the Rand Statistical Consulting Service. Here are my colleagues in the RAND Statistics group. You can email me at schonlau at uwaterloo dot ca. I spent the academic year 2009/2010 on sabbatical at the German Institute for economic analysis (DIW) in Berlin, Germany. The DIW hosts the longest running household panel in Germany, SOEP. The sabbatical was made possible in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB). Before joining Rand's Pittsburgh office in 2005, I worked at RAND's Santa Monica headquarters. From 1997-1999 I held a joint appointment with the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and AT&T Labs - Research In 1997, I graduated from the University of Waterloo.

Research Interests:

My research interests include the methodology of Web surveys and surveys in general. For example, Web surveys are often non-probability samples which do not allow for inference. I experimented with adjustments for selection through the use of additional lifestyle questions that may capture the difference between online and offline population. As a result of my sabbatical with the SOEP group in Berlin, Germany, I have become interested in household panel surveys. In Waterloo, I am involved with the International Tabacco Control project which conducts panel surveys in 20 countries around the globe. I am currently working on the analysis of open-ended questions using text mining techniques.

When the opportunity arises I enjoy programming. Much of my early programming was in C/C++ (e.g. software for the analysis of computer experiments). Because of time constraints I have lately focused on add-on programs in Stata that seamlessly integrate with existing Stata commands. One highlight was a plugin of the machine learning technique "boosting" (programmed from scratch in C++) to Stata. More recently, my Stata program for respondent driven sampling has been downloaded in many countries.

Teaching:

Recently taught courses / courses about to teach:

• "Introduction to Statistics" (Stat 231)
• "Statistics for Business I" (Stat 371) which consists of linear regression (6 weeks) and sampling (6 weeks).
• Stat 332 - sampling (6 weeks) and experimental design (6 weeks)
• short course on Respondent Driven Sampling at the "Survey Methods for Hard to Reach Populations" conference in New Orleans, RAND corporation, Santa Monica and in Sydney, Australia