Dr. Tractenberg has been promoting ethical research by statisticians and non-statisticians since 2009.
Rochelle Tractenberg is a tenured professor at Georgetown University. She is a research methodologist and has been a consulting biostatistician and scientist since 1997. She earned PhDs in cognitive sciences (1997) and statistics, measurement, and evaluation (2009) and has been training university-level instructors and providing faculty development around teaching and learning since 1993.
Dr. Tractenberg qualified for the Professional Accreditation (PStat®) from the American Statistical Association in 2012 and served the statistical community by volunteering her time as chair and vice chair of the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics. She was also chair of the working groups charged with revising the ASA ethical guidelines.
She has given workshops, short courses, and lectures on the ethical practice of statistics around the world, including at the following:
- National Institute of Statistical Sciences
- Jamaican Statistical Society
- American Statistical Association
- Columbia University master’s program in data science
- Women in Data Science (regional)
- Women in Statistics and Data Science (national)
Additionally, she has presented ethical research practices at the University of Melbourne, Stockholm University, and Victor Babes University (Romania).
Dr. Tractenberg has been interested in teaching and learning in higher education (mainly graduate/post graduate/professional), especially statistics and statistical literacy (since 2004) and ethical reasoning (since 2009). She has written two books on this topic: Ethical Reasoning for a Data-Centered World and Ethical Practice of Statistics and Data Science. She contributed sole (3) and co- (4) authored chapters to the 2024 book, Ethics in Statistics: Opportunities and Challenges. A new book focusing on the Ethical Practice of Statistics and Data Science for Public Servants/the Government setting is in preparation (2024). She is contributing to a forthcoming UN Handbook on Ethical Statistical Practice for National Statistics Organizations (2024).
Ethical reasoning in and practice of statistics and data science is not essential solely for statisticians and data scientists! All those who use, work with, and argue from data have responsibilities to do so ethically. Dr. Tractenberg has been promoting ethical research by statisticians and non-statisticians since 2009.
She was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2016, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017, and a Fellow of the International Statistics Institute in 2024. She co-chaired (2011–2018) the Working Group on the Certification of Training Mentors for Responsible Conduct of Research at Georgetown University; this working group and paradigm received a National Science Foundation EESE grant (2012–2015) to focus on faculty and a private foundation grant (2013–2014) to focus on PhD students. She completed an NSF-funded incubation project to create new guidelines for ethical mathematical practice (2020–2022) and is engaged in a new NSF-funded project (2022–2025) to engage higher education mathematics instructors supporting all STEM disciplines in integrating ethical practice standards and content. Proto-Ethical Guidelines for Mathematics Practice were published in 2024.
You can find out more about Dr. Tractenberg at her “day job” and send an email to her from the Georgetown University website.
To learn more about her teaching/learning (and scholarship thereof), you can check out her teaching portfolio. You can find information about Mastery Rubrics for curriculum development and evaluation at MasteryRubric.org and more general information about Professor Tractenberg at tractenberg.org.
All of Dr. Tractenberg’s talks (annotated), posters, and papers are available on her Academia.edu page.
Follow Dr. Tractenberg on Twitter (@rtractenberg).
