IN MEMORY OF

Professor Susanne Rässler (1962 - 2018)

PROFESSOR OF STATISTICS AND ECONOMETRICS

It is with tremendous sadness that the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS) announces the untimely death of one of its senior founding members, Professor Susanne Rässler. Susanne held the chair for Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Bamberg’s Faculty of Social Sciences, Economics and Business Administration. She was a very distinguished professor at the University of Bamberg and a wonderful, warm and tremendously empathetic individual. We will miss her terribly. Our thoughts and very best wishes go out to her family, friends and close colleagues.

Professor Rässler joined the University of Bamberg in September 2007 when she was appointed to the Chair for Statistics and Econometrics. She moved to Bamberg following a very successful career as a researcher and academic. Starting out with an apprenticeship at the Siemens AG she read for a degree in Business Administration at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, majoring in Statistics and Business Informatics. After graduating, she pursued a doctorate at the same university, which she completed in 1995.

Her professional academic career began at Erlangen-Nürnberg with a lectureship at the Chair of Statistics and Econometrics and the acceptance of her post-doctoral dissertation in 2001. Between 2004 and 2007 she headed a number of units at the Institute for Labor Market and Occupational Research (IAB) Nuremberg. Before her appointment to the chair in Bamberg she was awarded the position of Adjunct Professor for Computational Statistics at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. After her appointment to the chair in Bamberg, she served as Vice Dean for Learning and Teaching of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Economics and Business Administration between 2008 and 2017.

Her many external functions included coordinator of the methods team of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS); Member of the Council for Social and Economic Data (RatSWD) (since 2008); Member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the collection of official statistics and of the Federal Government’s Scientific Advisory Board for the German Census (Census Commission) (since 2011).

Her main areas of research were: missing data techniques; nonresponse; imputation techniques; sampling theory; computational statistics; Monte Carlo methods; optimization techniques; data fusion and identifiability; splitting of questionnaires (development of a 'Split Questionnaire Survey' design); Bayesian statistics; Bayesian approaches to econometrics of financial markets; econometric estimation of productivity on company data level; evaluation research (especially econometric evaluation of educational measures); software reliability engineering, performance configuration problems.

She was a member of the American Statistical Association (ASA), the German Statistical Association (DStatG), the International Association of Survey Statisticians (IASS), the Methodological Department of the German Sociological Association (DGS) and a founding member of the European Association of Methodology (EAM). Her activities as an editor of scholarly journals included the positions of Associate Editor of the Journal of Official Statistics (JOS) (since 2003) and co-editor of the AStA – (Archive of economics and social sciences) (since 2007). ◼

Dr. Susanne Rässler (28 November 1962 – 29 August 2018), Professor of Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Bamberg, is survived by her husband, Hendrik Rässler.

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// written by Thomas Saalfeld, former Director of the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences

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