John H. Thompson

John H. Thompson has been director of the U.S. Census Bureau since 2013. He is overseeing preparations for the 2020 Census and presides over more than 100 other censuses and surveys, which measure America’s people, places and economy and provide the basis for crucial economic indicators, such as the unemployment rate.

A statistician and executive, Thompson had been president and chief executive officer of NORC, previously known as the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago since 2008 and executive vice president from 2002 to 2008. Before joining NORC, he was an associate director with the Census Bureau, where he had enjoyed a long career from 1975 to 2002

A longtime leader in the social science research community, Thompson is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and past chair of the association’s Social Statistics Section and Committee on Fellows. He served as a member of the Committee on National Statistics at the National Academy of Sciences. He participated as a member of the CNSTAT panel on the design of the 2010 Census Program of Evaluations and Experiments and the panel to review the 2010 Census.

Thompson holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Virginia Tech.