Lien-Ju Anne Chao (Chinese: 趙蓮菊) 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.^[1] Chao has described herself as "60% statistician, 30% mathematician and 10% ecologist".^[2] She is known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating the size and diversity of populations.^[3]

Chao earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at National Tsing Hua University in 1973. She moved to the U.S. for graduate studies, completing a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977.^[1] Her dissertation, supervised by Bernard Harris, was The Quadrature Method in Inference Problems Arising From the Generalized Multinomial Distribution.^[4] 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.^[1]

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.^[1]

Chao was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1997.^[1] She is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.^[5]