Phillip Kott

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Phillip S. Kott (born 1952) is an American statistician known for his work in survey statistics since 1984. He specializes in designing surveys, analyzing survey data, and using calibration weighting to improve estimates. He helped make the Agricultural Resource Management Survey more efficient, so it uses survey information more effectively. He has taught at George Mason University and the USDA Graduate School, and he has served as an editor for major statistics journals.

Education and early career: Kott earned a BS in Mathematics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974, an MA in Economics from Brown University in 1975, and a PhD in Mathematical Economics from Brown in 1978. He began his career as an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1978–1984), then moved to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 1987 he joined the National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA), where he worked until 2008, with a brief stint at the Census Bureau in 1990. He retired from NASS as chief research statistician and continued part-time until 2010. From 2009 to 2024, he was a senior research statistician at the Research Triangle Institute (RTI).

Contributions and honors: Kott has been active in the statistical community, teaching, organizing conferences, and representing ASA chapters. He was president of the Washington Statistical Society (1996–1997) and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1996). He received the ASA’s Environment Statistics Distinguished Achievement Medal (1997), the Presidential Rank Award (2007), and the NISS Distinguished Service Award (2017). In 2021 he was inducted into the National Agricultural Statistics Service Hall of Fame for his contributions to agricultural statistics. He co-edited the book Business Survey Methods (1995) and has written hundreds of papers on survey methodology.