Eric Grau

Eric Grau has more than 30 years of experience working in statistics and began his specialization in sampling statistics more than 20 years ago.

As a sampling statistician and task leader, Grau has been responsible for designing and implementing samples, calculating sample size and power, creating sampling and analysis weights, calculating response rates, imputing missing data, estimating variances accounting for complex sample designs, and for creating data sets for public and restricted use that are modified to reduce disclosure risk. He is responsible for documenting procedures using language accessible to non-statisticians.

Grau has directed the statistical and sampling activities on a variety of projects across the Health, Human Services, and Global Focus Areas. He served as the task leader for sampling and weighting for the large-scale National Beneficiary Survey, which was conducted nationwide among a population of persons with disabilities; for the Physician Practice Information Survey, an American Medical Association-funded project that seeks to obtain information about expenses and physician hours in practices across the U.S.; and for studies involving samples of school food authorities in the School Meal Operations study and the School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study. He oversaw data analysis and data collection efforts in an evaluation of land tenure, agricultural investment, and finance in Madagascar; and he designed address-based samples of individuals for the Poverty, Well-Being, and Food Security Study, which concentrated on six poor counties in the South, Southwest, and Appalachia, and for the Massachusetts-based Wealth Survey.

Grau joined Mathematica in 2006 after serving five years at RTI as a lead sampling statistician in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. He has authored several technical, methodological, and subject-matter papers and presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings, the American Association of Public Opinion Research, the Health Survey Research Methods Conference, and the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University.