Carolina is a principal statistician at NORC with more than 15 years of experience in survey research, statistical modeling, data integration, and consulting. She is widely recognized for her ability to design and lead rigorous, reproducible statistical approaches to complex, real-world problems, and for translating results into meaningful evidence that informs decisions at every level of government and practice.

Carolina’s work reflects the wide reach of statistical methods across local, national, and international contexts. As lead statistician on the CDC-funded Expanding Hearing Loss Education & Awareness project, she developed the models underlying the nation’s first state- and county-level hearing loss prevalence estimates by demographic subgroups, and the results generated coverage by more than 1,000 media outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and the Associated Press. The work also was incorporated in an interactive public map that continues to serve researchers, clinicians, and policymakers nationwide. For the Illinois Department of Public Health, she developed 245 statistical models to produce local estimates of 35 key health conditions across geographic and demographic groups. These results now serve as the official IDPH estimates informing public health planning statewide.

As principal statistician on a project for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, she analyzed factors that influence decisions to drive while impaired by alcohol, applying both traditional statistical methods and machine learning techniques to federal crash data. She has provided statistical leadership for informing site selection for the Cosmic Explorer gravitational-wave observatory and serves as sampling and weighting advisor for NORC’s study of Australia’s landmark under-16 social media ban. Earlier, at the U.S. Census Bureau, she led model development for the 2021 Voting Rights Act Section 203 determinations and contributed to the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program, which directs billions in federal education funding each year.

Carolina has an extensive record of peer-reviewed publications, invited talks, and professional leadership spanning data integration, small area estimation, measurement error, and survey statistics. An elected member of the International Statistical Institute, she has delivered more than 50 invited talks at universities, statistical agencies, and conferences worldwide, and has been repeatedly engaged as an expert by multiple branches of the United Nations in capacity-building initiatives, with work spanning Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, and globally.

Before joining NORC, Carolina served as group leader for the Small Area Estimation Group at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Statistical Research and Methodology, where she worked for about a decade. She has also taught small area estimation at the University of Maryland’s Joint Program in Survey Methodology.