Professor Katherine McLaughlin Awarded Dean's Early Career Achievement Award

02/17/26

A woman in a purple shirt stands next to a woman in a black outfit holding an award.

Katherine McLaughlin from the Department of Statistics, received the Dean’s Early Career Achievement Award.

Katherine McLaughlin, an associate professor in Oregon State University’s Department of Statistics, has received the Dean’s Early Career Achievement Award in recognition of her influential work in statistical methods for hard-to-reach and hidden populations. Since joining OSU in 2016, McLaughlin has built an international reputation for developing innovative approaches to studying vulnerable groups, including victims of human trafficking and populations at elevated risk for HIV. She has published 19 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, presented at major venues such as the CDC and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and helped secure roughly $3.4 million in research funding.

McLaughlin’s research has had broad global impact, including the development of the “Visibility SS-PSE” model, a key method used in the UNAIDS Key Population Atlas to estimate population sizes and inform international HIV policy. She also advises the U.S. Department of State-funded Prevalence Reduction Innovation Forum, contributing to global efforts to improve the statistical measurement of human trafficking. At OSU, she played a central role in the TRACE and PIPP pandemic response initiatives, leading the design and analysis of large-scale COVID-19 community surveys and supporting the integration of wastewater data into public health decision-making, while earning praise from colleagues for the depth and scope of her contributions.