Benjamin M. Reist is a principal statistician in NORC’s Statistics & Data Science department, chair of the NORC Disclosure Review Board, and a member of NORC’s Data Governance Board. He brings more than 20 years of federal statistical and data science experience.

At NORC, Ben led statistical work for High School and Beyond (HS&B) and leads statistical work for the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), overseeing adaptive survey design, sampling, weighting, and variance estimation. He serves as principal statistician for the Healthy Illinois Survey (HIL), one of the largest state level multi-mode address-based studies in the United States, which produces estimates for all 102 counties, municipalities in Cook County, and 77 Chicago community areas, along with a public facing tool for custom maps and tabulations. He is senior staff on the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) Data Modernization Framework for Federal Surveys, contributing to an integrated approach to the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG), National Training, Education, and Workforce Survey (NTEWS), and SDR, and assessing linkages to administrative and third party data, alternative sampling frames, and operational efficiencies to improve coverage, timeliness, and burden. Ben also led a multi-year effort to document, evaluate, and modernize survey designs across 81 USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) surveys, proposing and testing new sampling and estimation approaches that demonstrated improvements in cost, coefficients of variation, and respondent burden.

Ben’s disclosure and data privacy work includes serving as senior advisor to Covered California to design an agency wide disclosure review process aligned with HIPAA standards, complete with implementation tools and staff training to support sustainable, consistent reviews of public data products. For Pew Research Center’s Asian American Survey, he led creation of an anonymized public use file using a sampling first approach supplemented by recoding, Post Randomization Method (PRAM), and partial synthesis, validating risk via attribution probabilities and utility via propensity scores, and reweighting to preserve key estimates. He also contributed to the Data Protection Toolkit Use Case Analysis for NCSES and the National Secure Data Service Demonstration, conducting qualitative interviews across sectors and informing enhancements to toolkit content and usability.

He has served on expert panels including the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators Advisory Committee. His research has appeared in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Official Statistics, Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Justice Quarterly, Statistical Journal of the IAOS, and Statistics in Medicine. Before joining NORC, Ben held senior roles across the federal statistical system, including deputy chief data officer and acting associate chief information officer at NASA, deputy director for science and planning and agency scientific integrity officer at USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. He has also held leadership roles at the U.S. Census Bureau, including survey director and lead scientist for the NSCG and assistant center chief for research in the Center for Adaptive Design.