Anne Chao

Lien-Ju Anne Chao (Chinese: 趙蓮菊) is a Taiwanese environmental statistician. She works in the Institute of Statistics at National Tsing Hua University, where she is Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor and a former Taiwan National Chair Professor.[1] Chao has described herself as "60% statistician, 30% mathematician and 10% ecologist".[2] She is known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating the size and diversity of populations.[3] She has authored or co-authored a number of software tools for quantifying and estimating biological diversity[4][5], and her scholarly works have been cited more than 23,000 times as of November 2019[6].

Chao earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at National Tsing Hua University in 1973. She came to the U.S. for graduate study, completing a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977.[1] Her dissertation, supervised by Bernard Harris, was The Quadrature Method in Inference Problems Arising From the Generalized Multinomial Distribution.[7] After working for a year as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan, she returned to National Tsing Hua University as a faculty member in 1978. She was Taiwan National Chair Professor there from 2005 to 2008, and became Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor in 2006.[1]

With Lou Jost, Chao is the author of Diversity Analysis (Taylor & Francis, 2008; Chapman & Hall, 2017). She is also the author with of Statistical Estimation of Biodiversity Indices (Wiley, 2017) with Chun-Huo Chiu and Jost.[1]

Chao was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1997.[1] She is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.[8]