Mary Grace Kovar (July 6, 1929 – September 21, 2015) was an American statistician. Kovar worked as chief of the Analytical Coordination Branch of the Division of Analysis at the

National Center for Health Statistics The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is a U.S. government agency that provides statistical information to guide actions and policies to improve the public health of the American people. It is a unit of the Centers for Disease Control ...

. For many years she was the coordinator of ''Health, United States'', a series of books reporting the health statistics of Americans. By 1996, she had retired from the NCHS, and had become a senior research scientist at

NORC at the University of Chicago NORC at the University of Chicago is one of the largest independent social research organizations in the United States. Established in 1941 as the National Opinion Research Center, its corporate headquarters is located in downtown Chicago, with o ...

. She was a vice president at NORC by 2000. She married Earl S. Pollack, a

biostatistician Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experimen ...

at the National Institutes of Health. Pollack died in 2012. The topics of some of Kovar's best-cited publications include trends in

blood lead level Blood lead level (BLL), is a measure of the amount of lead in the blood. Lead is a toxic heavy metal and can cause neurological damage, especially among children, at any detectable level. High lead levels cause decreased vitamin D and haemoglob ...

s, infant nutrition and its effects on health, patterns of sensitivity to allergens,, longitudinal studies of

aging Ageing ( BE) or aging ( AE) is the process of becoming older. The term refers mainly to humans, many other animals, and fungi, whereas for example, bacteria, perennial plants and some simple animals are potentially biologically immortal. In ...

, and a comparison of the results of in-person interviews versus telephone surveys. Kovar was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1979, seven years after Pollack. She became a fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

in 1990.

Selected publications

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kovar, Mary Grace 1929 births 2015 deaths American statisticians Women statisticians Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Statistical Association