Ronald D. Fricker is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Virginia Tech, where he has served as head of the Department of Statistics, Senior Associate Dean in the College of Science and, subsequently, interim dean of the college. He is the author of Introduction to Statistical Methods for Biosurveillance (2013) and with Steve Rigdon, Monitoring the Health of Populations by Tracking Disease Outbreaks (2020). He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.