| Lien-Ju Chao | |
| Native Name: | 趙蓮菊 |
| Birth Name: | Lien-Ju Chao |
| Birth Date: | c. 1950 (age c. 74) |
| Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor | |
| Alma Mater: | National Tsing Hua University (BS) University of Wisconsin–Madison (PhD) |
| Thesis Title: | The Quadrature Method in Inference Problems Arising From the Generalized Multinomial Distribution |
| Thesis Year: | 1977 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Bernard Harris |
| Fields: | Environmental statistics |
| Workplaces: | National Tsing Hua University |
| Notable Works: | Diversity Analysis, Statistical Estimation of Biodiversity Indices |
Lien-Ju Anne Chao (; born 1950) is a Taiwanese environmental statistician. She works in the Institute of Statistics at National Tsing Hua University, where she is Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor and a former Taiwan National Chair Professor. Chao has described herself as "60% statistician, 30% mathematician and 10% ecologist". She is known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating the size and diversity of populations. The Chao1 and Chao2 estimators of species richness are named after her.
Chao earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at National Tsing Hua University in 1973. She moved to the United States for graduate studies, completing a PhD in statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Her dissertation, supervised by Bernard Harris, was The Quadrature Method in Inference Problems Arising From the Generalized Multinomial Distribution.After working for a year as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan, she returned to National Tsing Hua University as a faculty member in 1978. She was Taiwan National Chair Professor there from 2005 to 2008, and became Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor in 2006.
With Lou Jost, Chao is the author of Diversity Analysis (Taylor & Francis, 2008; Chapman & Hall, 2017). She is also the author of Statistical Estimation of Biodiversity Indices (Wiley, 2017) with Chun-Huo Chiu and Jost.
Chao was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1997.She is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.