Industrial Statistician  ·  Lake Jackson, TX

Fabio D'Ottaviano

Senior Research Scientist at Dow  ·  26 years of cross-disciplinary R&D  ·  Named inventor on 11 patents

Fabio D'Ottaviano

About

I trained as an engineer and spent my first years working close to the plants, the customers, and the messy data that real industrial processes throw off. Statistics kept being the thing standing between a good question and a reliable answer, and there was rarely anyone around equipped to handle it properly. So I became that person.

Today I’m Dow’s cross-business methodologist — the one called in when a statistical problem doesn’t fit the textbook. That’s meant catalytic reaction kinetics one month, microplastics detection limits the next, oil-field trial design after that. The domains change; the pattern doesn’t. The harder the problem, the smaller the standard toolbox, and the more the work comes down to first principles.

The engineering background turned out to be the most useful thing I brought to statistics. It makes me bilingual: I can sit with the chemists and the process engineers, understand what they’re actually asking, and translate it into something a statistical method can answer.

Outside the day job, I help write the measurement standards my industries run on and serve on the discipline’s award committees. I’ve also published a paper on competitive balance in sports leagues — for no professional reason at all, just because I wanted to know the answer and nobody had worked it out.

Publications & Standards

Patents

Named inventor on 11 Dow patent records, 2006–2019.

Professional Service

Shewell Award — Selection Committee Chair

Fall Technical Conference (FTC), jointly sponsored by ASA's SPES section and ASQ. The Shewell Award recognizes the outstanding presentation at FTC each year.

Youden Award — Committee Member

Technometrics (ASA/ASQ). Annual award for the best expository paper in the discipline's flagship industrial-statistics journal.

Wilcoxon Prize — Committee Member

Technometrics (ASA/ASQ). Annual prize for the best practical-applications paper in Technometrics.

PSTC Technical Advisor

Pro bono technical advisor to the Pressure Sensitive Tape Council. Sole author of the MSA technical foundation underpinning PSTC's probe tack test method standard (Tape Week 2026).

BISFA 2010 — Named Contributor

International standard for testing bare elastolefin yarns. Authored the full statistics chapter, including sampling design, T² statistics, confidence limits, and outlier detection.

Career