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Official photo from ONS

Karen Hope Dunnell (born 16 June 1946) has been National Statistician, Registrar General and Director of the Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom since 1 September 2005.

Born Karen Williamson in Los Angeles, USA, she moved to Britain when she was a young child and was educated at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls and Bedford College, London. Her father was a US serviceman during World War II and her mother, who is English, was a teacher.

She started her career as a health care researcher with the Institute of Community Studies, where she wrote a book, Medicine Takers, Prescribers and Hoarders with Dr Ann Cartwright. She was then a lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School. She joined the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) in the mid 1970s, carrying out a wide range of national surveys, including a major one on disability, and managing medical statistics. When OPCS merged with the Central Statistical Office to form the ONS, she became the Director of Demography and Health Statistics. She later moved to a central post to help launch National Statistics and plan the arrival of Len Cook, the first National Statistician, in 2000.

She then became a Group Director in Social Statistics in 2000 and took up a post on the ONS Executive in 2002. She was responsible for setting up the new "Sources" Directorate, bringing together household and business surveys, the infrastructure that supports them and planning for the 2011 census. She has also launched the ONS Statistical Modernisation Programme designed to modernise ONS systems. As National Statistician, Karen Dunnell has accelerated^{[citation needed]} a policy of relocating the Office for National Statistics away from London to Newport, South Wales. This relocation policy, together with substantial expenditure cutbacks has resulted in morale problems and a high staff turnover rate^{[citation needed]}. In January 2007 Karen Dunnell announced the almost complete closure of the ONS's London offices by 2010.

• Visiting Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford (1989–1993)

Karen Dunnell has been married and divorced twice; she is thought to be the first ever Registrar General to be divorced. Her husbands were Keith Dunnell (1969-76) and Professor Michael Adler (1979-94). (Professor Adler subsequently married Labour politician Baroness Jay.) She has two adult daughters by her second marriage and one grand-daughter. She lives in London N1 and has a special fondness for a little place in the Var in SE France.

Karen Dunnell in New York City for UN Statistics Commission 2004