William F. Hunt, Jr.

Bill Hunt is the former Director of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Emissions, Monitoring and Analysis Division in the Office of Air and Radiation. The division is responsible for the National: air monitoring program, the emission inventory and factor program, the air modeling program, the emissions testing program and the statistics program, which tied all the data collection efforts together. The division consisted of 110 people mostly scientists, engineers, meteorologists, statisticians, etc. The division is responsible for conducting sound science to support the National air policy decisions that are made.

Mr. Hunt has started a new assignment as a Visiting Senior Scientist in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University. He has been asked by the university to strengthen the environmental programs and services offered by North Carolina State University and foster a broadening of the expertise of the university on both technical and policy issues related to air pollution.

Mr. Hunt received his M. S. in applied and mathematical statistics from Rutgers University in 1968. He received his B. A. in mathematics with minors in economics and natural science from Rutgers in 1966. He participated in the Advanced Institute on Statistical Ecology in the United States at Pennsylvania State University during the summer of 1972. He took additional courses on air pollution control engineering at California Institute of Technology, while serving as a Visiting Research Associate. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute; a fellow of the Air and Waste Management Association (AWMA); and a former chair of the Section on Statistics and the Environment of the American Statistical Association and a recipient of the Section’s Distinguished Achievement Award (1993). He is the former chair of the Environmental Technical Committee of the American Society for Quality Control and served on the Standing Review Board of the Quality Press. He is an Editorial Group Member of the Journal of Environmental Statistics. He is the former chair of the Environmental Measurements Division of the AWMA.

Over the past 31 years, Mr. Hunt has been in the forefront of advancing good statistical practice in the analysis of environmental data. He has authored and co-authored over 75 publications. He created the statistical group within the EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards which has prospered for over 27 years. He served as the Deputy Team Leader for the Persian Gulf Risk Evaluation Team, which dealt with the air pollution problem resulting from the Kuwait oil fires. He directed an interagency team of scientists from the military, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the State Department in dealing with the fires. He has received numerous awards for his work including an EPA Gold Medal for Exceptional Service for his work on the Kuwait oil fires in the Persian Gulf and 5 EPA Bronze Medals. He is an Honorary Citizen of New Orleans, and an Honorary Louisiana Colonel. He is a Full Member of Sigma XI and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He has numerous Special Achievement Awards from the USEPA.

In addition to his international work in Kuwait, Mr. Hunt has served as the co-project leader of the US/Russia Working Group 02.01-14, Statistical Analysis Methodology and Air Quality Trend Assessment. He accompanied the Administrator of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency on a Presidential Fact Finding Mission to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to assess the impact of the Kuwait oil fires. He served as a consultant to the World Health Organization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and provided technical assistance to the Chinese Institute of Environmental Health Monitoring, Beijing, China in 1990. He served as a Consultant III to the Environment Directorate, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, France. Conducted a workshop on the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore in 1993 and consulted with United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) in Nairobi, Africa in 1994. He served as the Special Counsel, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, France from June 1991 – May 1994 dealing with environmental indicators.