Masthead
Editor-in-Chief
Xiao-li Meng
Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Data Science Review, is well known for his depth and breadth in research, his innovation and passion in pedagogy, his vision and effectiveness in administration, as well as for his engaging and entertaining style as a speaker and writer. Meng was named the best statistician under the age of 40 by COPSS (Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) in 2001, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his more than 150 publications in at least a dozen theoretical and methodological areas, as well as in areas of pedagogy and professional development. He has delivered more than 400 research presentations and public speeches on these topics, and he is the author of “The XL-Files," a thought-provoking and entertaining column in the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) Bulletin. His interests range from the theoretical foundations of statistical inferences (e.g., the interplay among Bayesian, Fiducial, and frequentist perspectives; frameworks for multi-source, multi-phase and multi- resolution inferences) to statistical methods and computation (e.g., posterior predictive p-value; EM algorithm; Markov chain Monte Carlo; bridge and path sampling) to applications in natural, social, and medical sciences and engineering (e.g., complex statistical modeling in astronomy and astrophysics, assessing disparity in mental health services, and quantifying statistical information in genetic studies). Meng received his BS in mathematics from Fudan University in 1982 and his PhD in statistics from Harvard in 1990. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago from 1991 to 2001 before returning to Harvard, where he served as the Chair of the Department of Statistics (2004-2012) and the Dean of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2012-2017).
Co-Editors
Jennifer Chayes
Jennifer Chayes is Technical Fellow and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. She was previously a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of over 140 academic papers and the inventor of over 30 patents. Her research areas include: phase transitions in computer science, structural and dynamical properties of networks, graph theory, graph algorithms, and computational biology. Chayes is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for the machine learning of large-scale networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, broadly defined, including applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and, most recently, climate change. Chayes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Fields Institute, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Mathematical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chayes has received numerous leadership awards including the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision of Award and the Mass Technology Leadership Council Distinguished Leader Award. She is the winner of the 2015 John von Neumann Lecture Award, the highest honor of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Chayes received an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University in 2016.
John Eltinge
John Eltinge is the Assistant Director for Research and Methodology at the United States Census Bureau. Before moving to the Census Bureau in 2016, he served as the Associate Commissioner for Survey Methods Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for twelve years; and previously served as a senior mathematical statistician at BLS, and as an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University. He earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University; is a fellow of the American Statistical Association; is an associate editor for Journal of Official Statistics and for Survey Methodology Journal; and is a member of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. He previously gave the Roger Herriot Memorial Lecture on Innovation in the Federal Statistical System; and was previously the President of the Washington Statistical Society, the overall chair of the 2003 Joint Statistical Meetings, an associate editor for The American Statistician, and an associate editor for the Applications and Case Studies Section of Journal of the American Statistical Association. His research interests include data quality; design optimization; integration of multiple data sources; imputation; time series; and small domain estimation. In addition, at the 2018 Joint Statistical Meetings, he presented the annual Deming Memorial Lecture, “Improving the Quality and Value of Statistical Information: 14 Questions on Management."
LINK: Webcast of Deming Memorial Lecture
Erica Groshen
Dr. Groshen is the Visiting Senior Scholar at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Research Fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. From 2013 to 2017, she served as the 14th Commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and inflation. Before that she was Vice President in the Research and Statistics Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her research has centered on jobless recoveries, wage rigidity and dispersion, and the role of employers in the labor market. She co-authored How New is the “New Employment Contract”? from W.E. Upjohn Institute Press and co-edited Structural Changes in U.S. Labor Markets: Causes and Consequences, from M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Dr. Groshen received the 2017 Susan C. Eaton Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.S. in mathematics and economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ralf Herbrich
Ralf is Director of Machine Learning Science at Amazon and Managing Director of the Amazon Development Center Germany. His team works on scalable problems as well as privacy- and resource-aware machine learning, probabilistic learning algorithms (including forecasting), linking structured content, machine translation, robotics and computer vision. In 2011, he worked at Facebook leading the Unified Ranking and Allocation team. From 2000 - 2011, he worked at Microsoft Research and was co-leading the Applied Games and Online Services and Advertising group which engaged in research at the intersection of machine learning and computer games and in the areas of online services, search and online advertising combining insights from machine learning, information retrieval, game theory, artificial intelligence and social network analysis. Ralf was Research Fellow of the Darwin College Cambridge from 2000 - 2003. He has a diploma degree in Computer Science (1997) and a Ph.D. in Statistics (2000). Ralf’s research interests include Bayesian inference and decision making, computer games, kernel methods and statistical learning theory. He is one of the inventors of the Drivatars system in the Forza Motorsport series as well as the TrueSkill ranking and matchmaking system in Xbox 360 Live. He also co-invented the adPredictor click- prediction technology launched in 2009 in Bing’s online advertising system.
Michael Jordan
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive and biological sciences. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009.
VIDEO: “SysML 18: Michael Jordan, Perspectives and Challenges”
Rob Lue
Robert Lue is a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University and the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, where he is responsible for fostering innovative teaching in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Lue earned his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, and since 1988 has taught undergraduate courses acclaimed for their innovative and interdisciplinary approach. In 2012, Lue’s extensive work on using technology to enhance learning took a new direction when he became the founding faculty director of HarvardX, Harvard’s university-wide online education initiative that includes the edX partnership with MIT, a role which he held until 2018. Lue now helps to shape Harvard’s engagement in online learning to reinforce its commitment to teaching excellence and expand its reach and impact globally. In 2017, he was awarded a grant from the Amgen Foundation to build LabXchange, an online platform for global science education that not only integrates the best of digital instruction and interactivity, but also connects students, teachers, and researchers for sharing and collaboration. He also serves as the faculty director of the Harvard Ed Portal, the primary community engagement center in Harvard's new Allston campus.
Bhramar Mukherjee
Bhramar Mukherjee is John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor and Chair, Department of Biostatistics; Professor, Department of Epidemiology , Professor, Global Public Health, University of Michigan (UM) School of Public Health; Research Professor and Core Faculty Member, Michigan Institute of Data Science (MIDAS), University of Michigan. She also serves as the Associate Director of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, The University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. She is the cohort development core co-director in the University of Michigan’s institution-wide Precision Health Initiative. Her research interests include statistical methods for analysis of electronic health records, studies of gene-environment interaction, Bayesian methods, shrinkage estimation, analysis of multiple pollutants. Collaborative areas are mainly in cancer, cardiovascular diseases, reproductive health, exposure science and environmental epidemiology. She has co-authored more than 200 publications in statistics, biostatistics, medicine and public health and is serving on PI as NSF and NIH funded methodology grants. She is the founding director of the University of Michigan’s summer institute on Big Data. Bhramar is a fellow of the ASA and AAAS and is the recipient of many awards for her scholarship, service and teaching at the University of Michigan and beyond.
Margo Seltzer
Margo Seltzer is a Canada 150 Research Chair and Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Systems at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare. She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is now an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) study group. She also served on the Computing Research Association Board of Directors, the CRA Computing Community Consortium, and was President of the USENIX Association. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, an ACM Fellow, a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010. Dr. Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Associate Editors A-L
Ani Adhikari
Ani Adhikari is Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests are centered on the applications of statistics in medicine and the natural sciences, but pedagogy has always been her primary focus. Most recently she has been involved in the development of Berkeley's new Data Science major for undergraduates and in the development of several new data science classes. She is a developer and instructor in two MOOCs on the EdX platform, including an introduction to data science. Prof. Adhikari is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at Berkeley and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. She received her undergraduate degree from the Indian Statistical Institute and her Ph.D. in Statistics from Berkeley.
Anima Anandkumar
Anima Anandkumar is a Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and Director of Research in Machine Learning at NVIDIA. Her research is in the areas of large-scale machine learning and high-dimensional statistics, and in particular, development of tensor methods that scale up machine learning to higher dimensions. She is also the recipient of the Alfred Sloan Fellowship, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, ARO and AFOSR Young Investigator Awards, NSF Career Award and several paper awards. She received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Stochastic Systems Group at MIT from 2009-2010, an Assistant Professor at UC Irvine from 2010-2016, and Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services from 2016-2018.
Steve Ansolabehere
Stephen Ansolabehere is Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is one of the nation’s leading academic experts on U. S. elections and voting behavior, and has written extensively on electoral competition, public opinion, media, political parties and election law and administration. He is author of four books, The Media Game (1993), Going Negative (1996), The End of Inequality: One Person, One Vote and the Transformation of American Politics (2008), American Government (2009, 2013), Cheap and Clean: How Americans Think About Energy in the Age of Global Warming (2014) and has published academic research in a wide range of fields, including political science, communications, economics, law, environment, and statistics. He is the Principal Investigator of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which he started in 2005. This NSF-funded research program conducts large-scale, national-sample election surveys as well as dozens of smaller surveys designed by 50 different research teams throughout the United States. He is a member of the CBS News Election Night Decision Desk and leads the Harvard Election Data Archive, an archive of election data for the United States and related census data. He directed of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project from its founding in 2000 through 2004. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. In 2007, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Shivani Agrawal
Shivani Agarwal is Rachleff Family Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also co-directs the Penn Research in Machine Learning (PRiML) center. Prior to this, she has been a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, an Assistant Professor and Ramanujan Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science, and a postdoctoral lecturer at MIT. She received her PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a bachelors degree in computer science as a Nehru Scholar at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include foundational questions in machine learning, applications of machine learning in the life sciences, and connections between machine learning and other disciplines such as economics, operations research, and psychology. More broadly, she is excited by research at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and statistics, and its ability to turn data into actionable insights in both the natural and social sciences.
David Banks
David Banks is the director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute and a professor in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. Previously, he held positions at the University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Food and Drug Administration. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is a past editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and a founding editor of Statistics and Public Policy. His research areas include adversarial risk analysis, dynamic text networks, human right data analysis, and some topics in machine learning.
Yoav Benjamini
Yoav Benjamini is the Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at the Department of statistics and O.R. at Tel Aviv University. He holds BSc. In Physics and BSc and MSc. In mathematics from the Hebrew University (1976), and PhD in Statistics from Princeton University (1981). He is a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience and the Edmond Safra Bioinformatics Center, both at Tel Aviv University. He was a visiting professor at Wharton, UC Berkeley, Stanford and Columbia Universities. Prof. Benjamini is a co-developer of the widely used and cited False Discovery Rate concept and methodology. His research topics are selective and simultaneous inference, replicability and reproducibility in science, and data mining, with applications in Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, Animal Behavior, Brain Imaging and Health Informatics. He received the Israel Prize for research in Statistics and Economics, and is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Francine Berman
Francine Berman is the Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is a Fellow of the AAAS, IEEE, and ACM. In 2009, Berman was the inaugural recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award for "influential leadership in the design, development, and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure." In 2015, she was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become a member of the National Council on the Humanities. Berman is a founder of the Research Data Alliance, a community-driven international organization created to accelerate research data sharing. She has served in many leadership positions including as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, co-Chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information, and co-Chair of the US-UK Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation. Berman currently serves as a Trustee of the Sloan Foundation and the Anita Borg Institute. Her research interests include data cyberinfrastructure, stewardship, preservation and policy, and social and ethical impact of the Internet of Things.
Joseph Blitzstein
Joe Blitzstein is Professor of the Practice in Statistics at Harvard University, where has taught since 2006, after completing his Ph.D. in Mathematics (with a masters in Statistics) at Stanford. At Harvard, he has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate probability, statistics, and data science courses. His probability course Stat 110 has grown to over 500 students (which in 2017 was the third largest course at Harvard), and free online versions of the materials can be found at stat110.net. With Hanspeter Pfister from Computer Science, he launched Harvard's first data science course and first joint Computer Science-Statistics course, CS 109/Stat 121, in 2013. Joe’s main research interests are in statistical inference for networks and foundational issues in statistics and data science.
Christine Borgman
Christine L. Borgman, Distinguished Research Professor and Director of the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA, is the author of more than 250 publications in information studies, computer science, communication, and law. These include three books from MIT Press: Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (2015), Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007); and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (2000). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. Her research addresses scientific data practices and policy; open science and open access; data sharing and reuse; knowledge infrastructures; privacy; and data governance. She has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, Lund University, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Loughborough University, Budapest University of Economic Sciences, and Eötvös Loránd University.
Tamara Broderick
Website
Tutorial Session: Variational Bayes and Beyond: Bayesian Inference for Big Data
Tamara Broderick is an Assistant Professor in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley Statistics, an MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, an MPhil in Physics and a Master’s in Mathematics from U Cambridge, and an AB in Mathematics from Princeton. She has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an Army Research Office Young Investigator Program award, Google Faculty Research Awards, the ISBA Lifetime Members Junior Researcher Award, the Savage and Evelyn Fix dissertation awards, the Berkeley Fellowship, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Marshall Scholarship. Her research is in scalable, theoretically sound methods for uncertainty and robustness quantification – with a focus on Bayesian approaches.
Emery N. Brown
Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose experimental research has established maintenance of oscillations in the brain’s extracellular currents as a primary mechanism through anesthetics create general anesthesia. His statistics research has developed signal processing algorithms to study dynamic processes in neuroscience. Dr. Brown served on President Obama’s NIH Brain Initiative Working Group. He is the recipient of an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Applied Mathematics, and the American Society of Anesthesiologists Excellence in Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. Dr. Brown is members of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.
Carlos Castillo-Chavez
Carlos Castillo-Chavez is a Regents Professor, Joaquin Bustoz Jr. Professor of Mathematical Biology, Distinguished Sustainability Scientist and Founding Director of the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center at ASU. Castillo-Chavez received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from three campuses of the University of Wisconsin and has co-authored over 250 publications. Per the Mathematics Genealogy Project, he is among the top 200 mentors of PhD students (49) in the history of mathematics. He was recognized with three White House Awards (1992, 1997, 2011) and served on President Obama’s Committee on the National Medal of Science (2010-2015). He is a George Polya Lecturer (2017-2019). He is a Provost Visiting Professor at Brown University, within its Division of Applied Mathematics and its Data Science Initiative. He is a fellow of SIAM, AMS, AAAS and the American College of Epidemiology.
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel is Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. She is also a Data Scientist and Professional Educator at RStudio. Mine’s work focuses on innovation in statistics pedagogy, with an emphasis on computation, reproducible research, student-centered learning, and open-source education. She organizes ASA DataFest, an annual international two-day data science competition. Mine works on the OpenIntro project, whose mission is to make educational products that are free, transparent, and lower barriers to education. She also teaches the popular Statistics with R MOOC on Coursera as well as numerous other online courses. In 2016 Mine received the ASA Waller Education Award. She is also the recipient of the 2015 JSM Best Paper Award in the Section on Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences and the 2014 Duke University David and Janet Vaughan Brooks Award for Teaching Excellence.
Gregory Crane
Gregory Crane received his PhD in Classical Philology at Harvard but has spent much of his career exploring the implications of the digital turn for the Humanities in general and for ancient languages in particular. From 2013 through 2018 he was Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig. He is Professor of Classics at Tufts University, with a secondary appointment in Computer Science.
Radu Craiu
Radu V. Craiu is Professor and Chair, Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto. He studied Mathematics at the University of Bucharest (BS 1995, MS 1996) and Statistics at The University of Chicago (PhD 2001). His main research interests are in computational methods in statistics, especially Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC), Bayesian inference, copula models and model selection. His theoretical and methodological contributions have found useful applications in Genetics and Ecology. He is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute and was awarded the SSC-CRM prize given by the Centre de recherche mathématiques and the Statistical Society of Canada to a statistical scientist for professional accomplishments in research during the first fifteen years after earning a doctorate.
Stephanie Dick
Stephanie Dick is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work sits at the intersection of the history of computing and the history of mathematics, primarily in the nineteenth through twentieth century United States. Her first project explores early attempts to automate mathematical theorem-proving and debates about the character of proof and of human cognitive faculties that informed them. Her second project explores the introduction of computing to domestic law enforcement in the 1960s. Stephanie completed her PhD in History of Science at Harvard University in 2015 and was a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows between 2015 and 2018.
Moon Duchin
Moon Duchin is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Senior Fellow in the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She serves as director of the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Society and as collaborating faculty in the Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies. Her mathematical subfields are geometry, topology, group theory, and dynamical systems. Her data science focus is in the study of electoral redistricting in the United States, using Markov chain Monte Carlo and other randomized algorithms to understand relationships between community, partisanship, race, and representation.
Vanja Dukic
Vanja is a Professor of Applied Mathematics, and a courtesy Professor of Economics, at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After receiving her PhD in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 2001, she was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting professor in the Department of Statistics, and then an Assistant and Associate Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Chicago. She has served on the Board of Directors of ISBA, Scientific Advisory Board for ICERM, and as an associate editor for JASA, Bayesian Analysis, and Statistica Sinica. Vanja's main research interests are in Bayesian modeling, multiscale systems modeling, and computational statistics. Her work has applications to a wide variety of fields, including environmental science, medicine (infectious disease spread, diagnostic testing, biomarker calibration), ecology, risk modeling and insurance. She has also served as an expert consultant for the government and numerous industry clients.
Barbara Englehardt
Barbara Engelhardt is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. She received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley, advised by Michael Jordan and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago with Matthew Stephens. She was an assistant professor at Duke University in Biostatistics and Statistical Sciences for three years prior to her move to Princeton. Barbara previously worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Google Research, and 23andMe. For her work, she received the Google Anita Borg Fellowship, an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER Award. She develops statistical and machine learning approaches for the analysis of biomedical data, including genomic data and hospital patient data.
Charles Elkan
Charles Elkan is currently a managing director and the global head of machine learning at Goldman Sachs in New York, and also an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Previously, he was the first Amazon Fellow and the leader of Amazon's central machine learning team in the US; before that, he was a professor of computer science at UCSD for many years, with leaves that included being a visiting associate professor at Harvard. Dr. Elkan's research has been mainly in machine learning, data science, and computational biology. In particular, the MEME algorithm that he developed with Ph.D. students has been used in over 4000 published research projects in biology. He is fortunate to have had inspiring undergraduate and graduate students who have become faculty at institutions including Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Washington, or who have become leaders at Google and other major companies.
Maria Fasli
Prof Maria Fasli is the Director of the ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre and founding Director of the Institute for Analytics and Data Science at the University of Essex. She was educated in Greece (BSc Informatics 1996) and obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex (2000). She has held positions at the University of Essex since 1999 and was Head of School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE) between 2009-2014. In 2005, she was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the HEA UK for her novel approaches to education and supporting the student experience. In 2016, she was awarded the UNESCO Chair in Analytics and Data Science. Her research interests lie in artificial intelligence techniques for complex systems and analysing and modelling structured/unstructured data. Her research has been funded by Research Councils and other organisations (over £8M to date) and she has worked with a range of companies in data analytics and artificial intelligence related projects. She has published over 130 papers in the field of AI and data science and has delivered keynote talks at international conferences and other events.
Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter
Website
"Researcher of the Month" Spotlight
Sylvia Fruhwirth-Schnatter is Professor of Applied Statistics and Econometrics at the Department of Finance, Accounting, and Statistics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria). She holds a PhD in mathematics from the Technical University of Vienna (Austria). She has contributed to research in Bayesian modeling and MCMC inference for a broad range of models, including finite mixtures, Markov switching models and state space models. She is particularly interested in applications of Bayesian inference in economics, finance, and business. She has published in all major statistical journals. Her 2006 monograph Finite Mixture and Markov Switching Models was awarded the Morris-DeGroot Price by of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). She was elected Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2014 and ISBA Fellow in 2018.
Robert Gibbons
Robert D. Gibbons is the Blum-Riese Professor and a Pritzker Scholar at the University of Chicago. He has appointments in the Departments of Medicine, Public Health Sciences and Comparative Human Development. He also directs the Center for Health Statistics. Professor Gibbons is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, and the Royal Statistical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers and five books. His statistical work spans the areas of longitudinal data analysis, item response theory, environmental statistics and drug safety and has led to thousands of applications in the biological and social sciences. Professor Gibbons has received life-time achievement awards from the American Statistical Association, the American Public Health Association and Harvard University. He is a founder of the Mental Health Statistics section of the American Statistical Association.
Mark Glickman
Dr. Mark Glickman, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, is Senior Lecturer on Statistics at the Harvard University Department of Statistics, and Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a Veterans Administration Center of Innovation. Dr. Glickman is known for having invented the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems for head-to-head competition, both of which have been adopted by many gaming organizations internationally. Dr. Glickman has served as a member of the US Chess Ratings Committee since 1985, and has been the Chair of the Committee continuously since 1992. He co-founded and co-organizes the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports, a bi-annual conference on the research and practice of applying statistical methods in sports. He is Associate Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports and was Editor-in-Chief 2015-2017. At Harvard, he is the founding head of the Lab for Sports Analytics.
Ruobin Gong
Ruobin Gong is assistant professor of statistics at Rutgers University. Her research interests lie at the foundations of uncertainty reasoning, theory and methods of statistical inference with random sets, imprecise probability, Dempster-Shafer theory of belief function, and applications in robust and privacy statistics. Ruobin obtained her Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University (2018) and B.Sc. in cognitive psychology from University of Toronto. She was a Harvard Horizons Scholar (2017) and research fellow for Data Science for Social Good at the University of Chicago (2015).
David Hand
David Hand is Senior Research Investigator and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, where he previously held the Chair of Statistics and Chaired the Research Board of the Data Science Institute. He serves on the Board of the UK Statistics Authority and the European Statistical Advisory Committee. He is a former president of the Royal Statistical Society and former Chair of the Board of the Administrative Data Research Network. He has received many awards for his research, including the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society and the Box Medal from the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics. His 29 books include Principles of Data Mining, Measurement Theory and Practice, The Improbability Principle, Information Generation, and Intelligent Data Analysis.
Alfred Hero
Alfred Hero is John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also founding Co-Director of the University’s Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) . He has appointments, by courtesy, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics. He received his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University. He is Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, was President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and has served on the IEEE Board of Directors of the IEEE. He is chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics under the US National Academies and co-chair of the SAMSI National Advisory Committee. Alfred Hero’s recent research interests are in high dimensional spatio-temporal data, multi-modal data integration, statistical learning and signal processing.
Andrew Ho
Andrew Ho is Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a psychometrician whose research aims to improve the design, use, and interpretation of test scores in educational policy and practice. Professor Ho is known for his research documenting the misuse of proficiency-based statistics in state and federal policy analysis. He has also clarified properties of student growth models for both technical and general audiences. His scholarship advocates for designing evaluative metrics to achieve multiple criteria: metrics must be accurate, but also transparent to target audiences and resistant to inflation under perverse incentives.
Nicholas Horton
Nicholas Horton is Beitzel Professor of Technology and Society and Professor of Statistics at Amherst College. His research involves the development and application of statistical methods with applications in psychiatric epidemiology and substance abuse research. Much of his work in recent years has focused on statistics and data science education. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science and recipient of the ASA's Founder’s Award for Distinguished Service. He has held numerous leadership positions including Chair of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies and chair of the ASA Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science workgroup. Nick serves on the National Academies Committee for Applied and Theoretical Statistics and is a co-author of the recently published "Undergraduate Data Science: Opportunities and Options" consensus study report.
Rafael Irizarry
Rafael Irizarry received his Bachelor’s in Mathematics in 1993 from the University of Puerto Rico and his Ph.D. in Statistics in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis work was on Statistical Models for Music Sound Signals. He joined the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1998 and was promoted to Professor in 2007. He is now the Chair of the Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. Since 1999, Rafael Irizarry’s work has focused on Genomics and Computational Biology applications. Professor Irizarry also develops open source software implementing his statistical methodology. His software tools are widely used and he is one of the leaders and founders of the Bioconductor Project, an open source and open development software project that provides one of the most widely used software tools for the analysis of genomic data.
Marina Jirotka
Marina Jirotka is Professor of Human Centred Computing at the University of Oxford. She leads a team focused on responsible innovation in a variety of advanced technologies - machine learning and AI, quantum technologies, social media technologies and the digital economy. Her work focuses on bringing a richer comprehension of socially organised work practices and interaction into the process of engineering technological systems. In particular her work is concerned with how new developments in machine learning and AI can be shaped to respect human agency, ensuring accountability of systems and the digital rights of individuals and communities. She is a leader in the discipline of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), a framework that uses anticipatory governance, reflection and stakeholder involvement to ameliorate the potential harms than can arise from computer-related technologies.
Booil Jo
Booil Jo, Ph.D., is Associate professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. She has been at the lead in developing pragmatic statistical methods based on the intersection of causal inference and latent variable modeling. She has published on various methodological topics such as treatment noncompliance, handling of nested data such as from cluster randomized trials, causal mediation, missing data, propensity scores, and longitudinal heterogeneity. Her current program of research is focused on developing statistical methods that jointly utilize latent variable modeling, causal inference, and statistical learning with the goal of advancing the field of personalized medicine. She is also actively involved in biostatics education and collaborative work in various fields of psychiatry/mental health research. She has been a leading member of American Statistical Association and Prevention Science Methodology group.
Karim Kassam
Karim Kassam heads analytics at the Pittsburgh Steelers, working with the coaching staff to analyze opponent tendencies and with the scouting staff to predict which college athletes will go on to become successful professionals. Prior to joining the Steelers, he was Senior Director of Quantitative Analytics at Legendary Entertainment, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Kassam obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Queen’s University, and MSc in Advanced Computing from Imperial College, and a PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University.
Sallie Keller
Sallie Keller, Ph.D., is Director of the Social and Decision Analytics Division within Biocomplexity Institute and Professor of Public Health Sciences at University of Virginia. Prior positions include Professor of Statistics and Director of Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory at Virginia Tech; Academic Vice-President and Provost at University of Waterloo; Director of IDA’s Analyses Science and Technology Policy Institute; William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering at Rice University; Head of Statistical Sciences group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Professor of Statistics at Kansas State University. She served as member of National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications; Committee on National Statistics; and chaired the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. She is fellow of AAAS, elected member of ISI, fellow and past president of the ASA, and member of the JASON advisory group. She holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State University.
Frauke Kreuter
Professor Frauke Kreuter is Director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, USA; Professor of Statistics and Methodology at the University of Mannheim; and head of the Statistical Methods Research Department at the Institute for Employment Research in Nürnberg, Germany. She founded the International Program in Survey and Data Science, and is co-founder of the Coleridge Initiative. Frauke Kreuter is elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, recipient of the Gertrude Cox Award and the ASA Links Lecture Award, and member of the advisory boards to Statistics Sweden, Statistics Canada and the German Institute for Economic Research.
Todd Kuffner
Todd Kuffner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Kuffner earned degrees from the University of Michigan and London School of Economics before completing his Ph.D. in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London in 2011. His research interests include philosophy of statistics and data science, higher-order asymptotics, high-dimensional and post-selection inference, the bootstrap, dependent data, differential geometry in statistics, and Bayes-frequentist reconciliation. He also works with neuroscientists at the Washington University School of Medicine to study disease progression in Alzheimer's disease.
Nicole Lazar
Nicole Lazar is Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Georgia. She received her undergraduate training in statistics and psychology at Tel Aviv University, and graduate training in statistics at Stanford University and the University of Chicago. She was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University from 1996 until 2004, when she moved to the University of Georgia. Dr. Lazar has served on the editorial boards of leading journals, including serving at Editor-in-Chief of "The American Statistician" from 2014 to 2017. In 2019, she is serving at President of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Sabina Leonelli
Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences
Sabina Leonelli is Professor in Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis) and coordinates the Data Studies group. She is also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London. Her research, currently supported by the European Research Council, UKRI, Turing and Australian Research Council, concerns the methods, infrastructures and assumptions involved in the use of big data for discovery; the epistemology of data-intensive science and its social and scientific implications; the role of the open science movement within global shifts in the production and publication of knowledge; and the status and history of organisms as scientific models and data sources. Leonelli’s publications span the fields of philosophy, social science, biology, history, data science and science policy, and include the award-winning book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016). She works closely with the European Commission on the development and implementation of Open Science policies.
Jure Leskovec
Jure Leskovec is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Chief Scientist at Pinterest, and investigator at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. His research focuses on machine learning and data mining applied to social, information and biological networks, their evolution, and the diffusion of information and influence over them. Computation over massive data is at the heart of his research and has applications in computer science, social sciences, economics, marketing, and healthcare. This research has won several awards including a Lagrange Prize, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and numerous best paper awards. Leskovec received his bachelor's degree in computer science from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and his PhD in machine learning from the Carnegie Mellon University and postdoctoral training at Cornell University.
Edlyn Levine
Edlyn V. Levine, Ph.D. is a Lead Scientist at the MITRE Corporation and a Research Associate in the Department of Physics at Harvard University. Dr. Levine currently leads several research projects in communications and cybersecurity at the nexus of classical and quantum information, with foci of plasmas dynamics and quantum metrology. Her research efforts are aimed at the development of advanced sensor platforms and communications systems. She is a four-time awardee of the MITRE Innovation Program grant for her research. Dr. Levine earned her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University where she was a National Defense Science and Engineering Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. She is a member of the Harvard Graduate School Alumni Council, and a member of the Executive Committee for the American Physical Society (APS) Forum for Industrial and Applied Physics.
Andrew Lo
Website
"Risk and Risk Management in the Credit Card Industry"
Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His current research interests in data science include: applications of machine learning to credit risk management, drug discovery, cancer therapeutics, and real-time psychophysiological data from financial traders; interpretability of machine-learning models; and data visualization. He has published numerous articles in finance and economics journals, and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. He is currently co-editor of the Annual Review of Financial Economics. He received a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, all in economics.
Associate Editors M-Z
David Madigan
David Madigan is Professor of Statistics at Columbia University in New York City and Dean Emeritus of Arts and Sciences. He received a bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Sciences and a Ph.D. in Statistics, both from Trinity College Dublin. He has previously worked for AT&T Inc., Soliloquy Inc., the University of Washington, Rutgers University, and SkillSoft, Inc. He has over 180 publications in such areas as Bayesian statistics, text mining, Monte Carlo methods, pharmacovigilance and probabilistic graphical models. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served terms as Editor-in-Chief of Statistical Science and of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining – the ASA Data Science Journal.
Andrew McCallum
Andrew McCallum is a Professor and Director of the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory, as well as Director of Center for Data Science in the College of Information and Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has published over 250 papers in many areas of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning and reinforcement learning; his work has received over 50,000 citations. In the early 2000s he was Vice President of Research and Development at at WhizBang Labs, a startup company that used machine learning for information extraction from the Web. He is a AAAI Fellow and the recipient of the UMass Chancellor's Award for Research and Creative Activity, the UMass NSM Distinguished Research Award, the UMass Lilly Teaching Fellowship, and research awards from Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo. He was the General Chair for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2012, and is the current President of the International Machine Learning Society.
Martha Minow
Martha Minow is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University and for eight years served as the dean of Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 1981. An expert in human rights with a focus on members of racial and religious minorities and women, children, and persons with disabilities, she has also worked on transitional justice, and freedoms of speech and religion. In the fall of 2018, she was one of seven faculty members from four universities offering a course on Law for Algorithms. Minow serves as an advisory council member of the MIT Media Lab and as a trustee of the MacArthur Foundation, and for two years, she was the acting director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
Christopher J. Phillips
Christopher J. Phillips is Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches the history of science. He is the author of “The New Math: A Political History” (Chicago University Press) and “Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball” (Princeton University Press). Currently, he is working on a history of statistics in medicine, focused particularly on researchers associated with the National Institutes of Health. More broadly, he researches the history of data and statistics, and in particular the spread of mathematical methods into new fields. He previously taught at NYU and holds a PhD in history of science from Harvard University.
Vincent Poor
H. Vincent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor at Princeton University, where he has been on the faculty since 1990. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, he was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During 2006 to 2016, he served as Dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has also hold visiting appointment at a number of other universities, most recently at Berkeley and Cambridge. His research interests are in the areas of information theory and signal processing, and their applications in wireless networks, energy systems, and related fields. Dr. Poor is a member of the National of Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign member of the Chinese of Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and other national and international academies. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2017 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal.
Nancy Reid
Website
"Statistical Inference, Learning and Models in Big Data.”
"'Statistical Science and Data Science': Talk Presented at Fisher Memorial Lecture, October 27, 2016"
Nancy Reid is University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory and Applications at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include statistical theory, likelihood inference, design of studies, and statistical science in public policy. She has held many professional leadership roles in statistical science, in Canada and abroad. Her main research contributions have been to the field of theoretical statistics. The goal is to use information from noisy data as efficiently and elegantly as possible, and to elucidate general principles for doing so, in order to provide structures for developing new statistical methods in new areas of application. Professor Reid is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2015 she was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada.
Cynthia Rudin
Cynthia Rudin - Interpretable ML for Recidivism Prediction - The Frontiers of Machine Learning
Cynthia Rudin is an associate professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and statistics at Duke University, and directs the Prediction Analysis Lab. Her interests are in machine learning and data science. Prof. Rudin has held positions at MIT, Columbia, and NYU. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University at Buffalo, and a PhD from Princeton University. She is the recipient of the 2013 and 2016 INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Awards, an NSF CAREER award, and was named by Businessinsider.com as one of the 12 most impressive professors at MIT in 2015. She is past chair of the INFORMS Data Mining Section, and is currently chair of the Statistical Learning and Data Science section of the American Statistical Association. She also serves on (or has served on) committees for DARPA, the National Institute of Justice, the National Academy of Sciences (for both statistics and criminology/law), and AAAI.
Chiara Sabatti
Chiara Sabatti is a Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Statistics at Stanford University. She grew up in Italy where she graduated from Bocconi University with a degree in “Economics and Social Disciplines” (DES) in 1993, working with Eugenio Regazzini. She obtained a PhD in Statistics from Stanford University in 1998 with a thesis on multi scale MCMC methods under the supervision of Jun Liu. Between 1998 and 2000 she was a post-doctoral scholar in Statistical Genetics with Neil Risch. In 2000 she joined the faculty at UCLA in the newly established departments of Human Genetics and Statistics and in 2009 she was appointed at Stanford. Her research efforts are devoted to developing statistical methodologies to extract actionable information from high dimensional genomics datasets. She has a keen interest in how society understands and utilizes what we learn from data and enjoys exploring these questions in open forums.
Nathan Sanders
“Unsupervised Transient Light Curve Analysis Via Hierarchical Bayesian Inference”
Nathan Sanders is a statistician, astronomer, and an organizer in science communication. Nathan is the Chief Scientist for WarnerMedia Applied Analytics, where he leads a team of physical, social, and computational scientists engaged in performing experiments, developing novel statistical and machine learning models, and generating remarkable insights about consumers and content for WarnerMedia's global media and entertainment business. Nathan is the Chair of the national Leadership Team for ComSciCon, the Communicating Science Conference series for graduate students (http://comscicon.com/); is a co-founder of Astrobites (http://astrobites.org) and the ScienceBites network of graduate student writing collaboratives; and serves on the Board of the American Institute of Physics. Nathan did his undergraduate work in Physics and Astrophysics at Michigan State University and earned his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University.
Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Ruslan Salakhutdinov is a UPMC Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Machine Learning at CMU. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2009. After spending two post-doctoral years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab, he joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science. In 2016 he joined CMU. Ruslan's primary interests lie in deep learning, machine learning, and large-scale optimization. He is an action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and served on the senior programme committee of several top-tier learning conferences including NIPS and ICML. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Machine Learning, a recipient of the Early Researcher Award, Google Faculty Award, Nvidia's Pioneers of AI award, and is a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
David Smith
David Smith is a founding member of the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, Northeastern's research center for the digital humanities and computational social sciences. He holds an A.B. in classics (Greek) from Harvard and a Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins. In between, he worked as a research programmer at the Perseus Project, a widely-used digital library of historical texts, linguistic information, art, and archaeology. Smith's research interests include statistical models of natural language morphology, syntax, semantics, and translation with applications to information retrieval, network analysis, historical linguistics, and the humanities and social sciences. Smith and NULab colleague Ryan Cordell, an associate professor of English, started the Viral Texts project to analyze cultural influence and information circulation in historical print media. With former students Abby Mullen and Jonathan Fitzgerald, they are finishing a book titled “Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers”.
Michael Stein
Michael Stein graduated from MIT in 1980 with a B.S. in mathematics and received the M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford in 1982 and 1984. After spending a year at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he is now the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Statistics and the College. Most of Stein's research has been in the statistical analysis of spatial and spatial-temporal processes with applications to the environmental sciences. His current research focuses on statistical problems in climatology and meteorology.
Hal Stern
Hal Stern is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He is known for his research work developing Bayesian statistical methods and model assessment techniques and for collaborative projects in the life sciences and the social sciences. He has published more than 100 refereed journal articles and he is a co-author of the highly-regarded graduate level statistics text Bayesian Data Analysis. Current areas of interest include applications of statistical methods in psychology, personalized medicine, sports statistics and forensic science. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Statistical Association (ASA) and the Institute for Mathematical Statistics (IMS). Stern received his B.S. degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Statistics from Stanford University in 1985 and 1987, respectively.
John J. Stevens
John Stevens is an Associate Director in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. His responsibilities include communicating the staff’s economic projection to policymakers, participating in range of strategic planning and oversight activities, conducting economic research, and leading or participating in a variety of data-related initiatives. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Research on Income and Wealth, the American Economic Association, and the National Association for Business Economics’ Statistics Committee. He is also a Special Sworn Status researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. Mr. Stevens holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota. His research has appeared in a variety of journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of International Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Economic Geography, and the B.E. Journals in Macroeconomics.
Vonu Thakuriah
"Big Data and Urban Informatics Workshop 2014"
Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah is Dean of the Edward J Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and Distinguished Professor in Rutgers University. Her research interests are on transportation, smart cities, and urban informatics. She is more widely interested in the role of automation and AI on our daily lives and on jobs, and in analytics of emerging sources of data for knowledge discovery to better address complex urban problems. More recent research has focused on data sharing, access to data, and building data infrastructure. Vonu is also an Honorary Professor of University of Glasgow, UK, where she was previously Ch2M Chair Professor of Transport, and (founding) director of the Urban Big Data Centre, a seven-university consortium funded by Research Council UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. The center has researchers from 10 academic disciplines in the social sciences, data sciences and engineering and operates a unique UK-wide data service to support innovations in smart and connected cities.
Caroline Uhler
Caroline Uhler joined the MIT faculty in 2015 and is currently the Henry and Grace Doherty Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society. She holds an MSc in mathematics, a BSc in biology, and an MEd from the University of Zurich. She obtained her PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley in 2011. After short postdoctoral positions at ETH Zurich, the Simons Institute and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, she spent 3 years as an assistant professor at IST Austria. She is a Sloan Research Fellow and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She received an NSF Career Award, a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt Foundation, and a START Award from the Austrian Science Foundation. Her research focuses on statistics and machine learning, in particular on graphical models and causal inference, and applications to genomics.
David Uminsky
David Uminsky is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Executive Director of the Data Institute at University of San Francisco (USF). His research interests are in machine learning, signal processing, pattern formation, and dynamical systems. He was selected in 2015 by the National Academy of Sciences as a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. He is also the founding Director of the BS in Data Science at USF and served as Director of the MS in Data Science program from 2014-2019. During the summer of 2018, David served as the Director of Research for the Mathematical Science Research Institute Undergrad Program on the topic of Mathematical Data Science. Before joining USF he was a combined NSF and UC President's Fellow at UCLA, where he was awarded the Chancellor's Award for outstanding postdoctoral research. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Boston University and a BS in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.
Lars Vilhuber
L. Vilhuber and C. Lagoze, “Making Confidential Data Part of Reproducible Research,” Chance, 2017.
Lars Vilhuber holds a Ph.D. in Economics ( Université de Montréal). His research interests lie in labor economics, statistics with linked and large datasets, and data publication. His work on statistical disclosure limitation issues comes from his profound interest in making data available in a multitude of formats to the broadest possible audience. His experience includes academic and government research positions, and he continues to consult and collaborate with government and statistical agencies in Canada, the United States, and Europe. At Cornell, he is Senior Research Associate in the ILR School, Executive Director of the Labor Dynamics Institute, and affiliated with the Department of Economics. He is Data Editor of the American Economic Association; Managing Editor of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality; Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Centre d’accès sécurisé aux données; Senior Advisor of the New York Federal Statistical Research Data Centers; and an affiliate of the U.S. Census Bureau (Center for Economic Studies).
Liberty Vittert
Liberty is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a graduate of MIT as well as Le Cordon Blue Paris and the University of Glasgow. Her current research involves using facial shape analysis to help children with facial deformities or victims of warfare. Liberty is a regular TV and Radio contributor to many news organizations including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, PBS, and FNC, as well as having her own TV series on STV (ITV). Her opinion editorials appear in Popular Science, US News, Newsweek, Business Insider, International Business Times, CBS News, The Conversation, and Fox News. As a Royal Statistical Society Ambassador, BBC Expert Woman, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, Liberty is writing a series of popular science books on how to lie with statistics from the viewpoint of multiple professions. Liberty is also on the board of USA for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as well as being on the board for The Hive (a data initiative), one of the Fast Company's top 6 most innovative non-profits.
Chris Wiggins
Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY (http://hackNY.org), a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001) and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award.
Rebecca Willett
Rebecca Willett is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her research is focused on machine learning, signal processing, and large-scale data science. She completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005 and was an Assistant then tenured Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University from 2005 to 2013. She was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Harvey D. Spangler Faculty Scholar, and Fellow of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013 to 2018. Willett received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007, was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group, and received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010.
Robert Williamson
Robert C. "Bob" Williamson is a professor in the research school of computer science at the Australian National University. Until 2017 he was chief scientist of DATA61 where he was responsible for the science vision. He was instrumental in creating NICTA, serving as Canberra laboratory director, machine learning group leader, scientific director, and CEO. He lead the writing of a report for the Chief Scientist of Australia on new technologies and their impacts. His research is focussed on three broad areas of machine learning: compositional theoretical foundations, including several recent works on fast rates in learning and the structure of loss functions and measures of information; architectural issues of large machine learning systems, and social aspects of machine learning, most recently focussing on questions of fairness. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Mathematical Society.
Alyson Wilson
Website
“Alyson Wilson: Using Data to Tell Stories”
“Twitter Geolocation: A Hybrid Approach”
Dr. Alyson Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include statistical reliability, Bayesian methods, and the application of statistics to problems in defense and national security. She is the coordinator of NCSU's Data-Driven Science faculty cluster and Associate Director of the NCSU Data Science Initiative. Prior to NCSU, Dr. Wilson was a Research Staff member at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute (2011-2013), a faculty member in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University (2008-2011), a Scientist in the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1999-2008), and a senior statistician with Cowboy Programming Resources (1995-1999). She is a Fellow of the ASA and the AAAS and a winner of the 2018 ASA Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security Distinguished Achievement Award (2018).
Sally Wyatt
Website
“Where is the knowledge we have lost in data?”
Sally Wyatt is Professor of Digital Cultures at Maastricht University. She originally studied economics (at McGill University in Canada and the University of Sussex in England). Her main intellectual affinity is with Science and Technology Studies (STS). For many years, her research has focused on digital technologies, both how they are used by people wishing to inform themselves about health-related issues, and how scholars themselves use digital technologies in the creation of knowledge. Her most recent book, co-authored with Anna Harris and Susan Kelly, is called CyberGenetics. Health Genetics and New Media (Routledge, 2016). Wyatt has participated in national and international policy-making activities around big and open data. She was part of the committee that prepared the international accord for Science International, called Open Data in a Big Data World (Boulton et al, 2015).
Eric Xing
Eric P. Xing is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Petuum Inc., a 2018 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer company that builds standardized artificial intelligence development platform and operating system for broad and general industrial AI applications. He completed his undergraduate study at Tsinghua University, and holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the State University of New Jersey, as well as a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architectures, for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in artificial, biological, and social systems.
Li-Chun Zhang
Li-Chun Zhang is Professor of Social Statistics at University of Southampton, Senior Researcher at Statistics Norway, and Professor of Official Statistics at University of Oslo. His research interests include finite population sampling design and coordination, finite graph sampling, sample survey estimation, non-response, measurement errors, small area estimation, index number calculations, editing and imputation, register-based statistics, statistical matching, record linkage. His involvement in research projects include the EU framework projects EURAREA, DACSEIS, RISQ and BLUE-ETS; the ESSnet projects Small Area Estimation, Data Integration and Quality of Multisource Statistics; the H2020-project InGRID-2; the ESRC-projects ADRCE, NCRM-SAE.
Harrison Zhou
"Optimal Rates of Convergence for Covariance Matrix Estimation"
Harrison Zhou is a Henry Ford II Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Yale. His main research interests include asymptotic decision theory, large covariance matrices estimation, graphical models, Bayesian nonparametrics, statistical network analysis, sparse canonical correlation analysis and principal component analysis, and analysis of iterative algorithms. His research has been acknowledged with awards including the National Science foundation Career Award, the Noether Young Scholar Award from the American Statistical Association, the Tweedie Award, the IMS Medallion lecture and IMS Fellow from the Institute of mathematical Statistics.
Advisory Board
John Balier
Website
Stats and Stories Website
John Bailer is university distinguished professor and founding chair of the Department of Statistics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is currently President-elect of the International Statistical Institute, and he will serve as ISI President starting in August 2019. He previously served on the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association. His research has focused on a breadth of collaborations addressing problems in toxicology, environmental health and occupational safety. He collaborates with journalists to produce the podcast Stats+Stories. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Society for Risk Analysis and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a staff fellow at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences before joining the faculty at Miami University.
Scott Berinato
Scott Berinato, self-professed dataviz geek, is the author of Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations, and Good Charts Workbook. Fast Company said of Good Charts, “It may just be the design manual of the year.” Presentation guru Nancy Duarte called Good Charts “the book I wish I’d written.” Berinato speaks frequently on the power and necessity of good data visualization—including three consecutive year presenting at SXSW in Austin, Texas—and has worked with many companies and individuals to up their dataviz game. He is also an award-winning writer and a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, where he writes and edits articles about visualization, data science, and technology and business, and is a content architect responsible for several innovations in publishing. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
David Blei
David Blei is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at Columbia University, and a member of the Columbia Data Science Institute. He studies probabilistic machine learning, including its theory, algorithms, and application. David has received several awards for his research. He received a Sloan Fellowship (2010), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2011), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011), Blavatnik Faculty Award (2013), ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2013), and a Guggenheim fellowship (2017). He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He is a fellow of the ACM and the IMS.
Stephen Blyth
Stephen Blyth is Professor of the Practice of Statistics at Harvard University, and winner of the Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching. His book, An Introduction to Quantitative Finance, was published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Blyth was previously President and CEO of the Harvard Management Company, responsible for managing the University’s endowment. He joined HMC in 2006 as head of international fixed income, and subsequently held roles as head of internal management and public markets. Before joining HMC, Dr. Blyth was Managing Director and head of global rates proprietary trading at Deutsche Bank, and Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. Dr. Blyth earned a PhD in statistics from Harvard University at age 24, and an MA in mathematics with first class honors from Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was Third Wrangler. After Harvard, he was a lecturer in mathematics at Imperial College, London.
Philip E. Bourne
Philip E. Bourne, PhD, FACMI is the Stephenson Chair of Data Science, Director of the Data Science Institute and a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. Prior to that he was the Associate Director for Data Science (ADDS; aka Chief Data Scientist) for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). In his role as ADDS he led the trans NIH US $110M per year Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) research initiative and contributed to data policies and infrastructure aimed at accelerating biomedical discovery. Examples include: establishing the NIH Commons, support for data and software citation and establishing preprints as a supported form of research. He has published over 350 papers and 5 books and co-founded 4 companies. His current research focuses on systems pharmacology (notably neglected tropical diseases and protein kinase targets), structural bioinformatics, scholarly communication, professional development and the development and application of data science methods.
Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, where he was for ten years the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab and then the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) until 2007. After undergraduate and masters degrees in mathematics in Australia he received a PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1981, was a post doc at CMU and MIT, and a faculty member at Stanford, before joining the MIT faculty in 1984. His research areas have been in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, AI, and Artificial Life. He was co-founder, CTO and Chairman of iRobot in 1990 and of Rethink Robotics in 2008. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, AAAI, and AAAS.
Cathy Chute
Cathy Chute is the Executive Director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science and Assistant Dean for Professional Programs at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science(SEAS). Cathy's work at IACS, home to two master’s programs in data science and computational science, focuses on growing IACS connections to industry partners and collaborators across the university. She is also responsible for developing new professional executive programs at SEAS. Cathy was previously the Publisher of Harvard Magazine as well as the Executive Director of the Ivy League Magazine Network. Prior to coming to Harvard, Cathy was a director of new business development at the New York Times.
David Cox
David Cox studied Mathematics at University of Cambridge. He then worked for six years in government or semi-government research laboratories connected with the aeronautical industry and later the wool industries. Then he held academic posts at Cambridge (Statistical Laboratory) and Chapel Hill (biostatistics) with shorter term appointments at Princeton and Berkeley. On returning to UK he was at Birkbeck College, University of London and then for 20 years at Imperial College of Science and Technology, Department of Mathematics. In 1988 he became Warden, Nuffield College, Oxford and since 1994 has been retired. His past and current research interests span a number of areas of applied and theoretical statistics.
Merce Crosas
Mercè Crosas is the Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. She has more than 10 years of experience leading the Dataverse project and more than 15 years of experience building data management and analysis systems in academia and biotechnology companies. She is part of numerous committees and working groups focused on data sharing, research data management, data citation, and data standards. Crosas is co-PI of the Dataverse Project, with IQSS director Gary King, and supervises the Consilience project for text analysis, the Data Science Services, and Data Curation team at IQSS. She collaborates with a wide range of data related projects, including the NIH Data Commons, Harvard Privacy Tools, DataTags, Data Provenance, the Structural Biology Grid Data , Cloud Dataverse with the Massachusetts Open Cloud, and the Boston Area Research Initiative, among others. Crosas holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and a B.S. in Physics.
Francesca Dominici
Francesca Dominici is Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. Her research focuses on the development of statistical methods for the analysis of large and complex data; she leads several interdisciplinary groups of scientists with the ultimate goal of addressing important questions in environmental health science, climate change, comparative effectiveness research in cancer, and health policy. Currently, Dominici’s team uses satellite data and multiple data sources to estimate exposure to air pollution in rural areas in the US, in India, and in other developing countries. Her studies have directly and routinely impacted air quality policy and led to more stringent ambient air quality standards in the United States. Dominici was recognized on the Thomson Reuters 2015 Highly Cited Researchers list, ranking in the top 1 percent of scientists cited in her field. In 2017, she was named one of the top 10 Italian women scientists with the largest impact in biomedical sciences across the world. In addition to her research interests and administrative leadership roles, Dominici has demonstrated a career-long commitment to promoting diversity in academia. For her contributions, she has earned the Jane L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences and the Florence Nightingale David Award. Dominici currently chairs the University Committee for the Advancement of Women Faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prior to Harvard, she was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also co-chaired the University Committee on the Status of Women. Dominici has degrees from University La Sapienza and University of Padua.
Andrew Gelman
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City, the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that your vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in your basement; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.
Elizabeth Langdon-Gray
Liz Langdon-Gray is the inaugural Executive Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative (DSI). In this role, she is responsible for implementing the academic vision of the Initiative, engaging closely with Harvard schools and the Office of the President and Provost. Liz oversees the management of the DSI’s operations and programmatic priorities, including the postdoctoral fellows program, the DSI Competitive Research Fund, seminars and workshops, and the Harvard Data Science Review. She fosters research collaborations through outreach efforts both within the University and with external partners, and leads the Initiative’s corporate engagement activities, establishing the DSI's Corporate Membership Program in 2018.
For more information, see the Data Science Initiative webpage.
Brendan McCord
Brendan was founding Chief Architect of the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and the primary author of the Department’s first AI Strategy. Brendan was Head of Machine Learning at Defense Innovation Unit, where he created the largest open dataset for object detection from overhead and delivered open source software that achieved the world speed record for training deep neural nets on public infrastructure. Previously, Brendan led a team of deep learning researchers and engineers at a startup backed by Bill Gates, In-Q-Tel, and leading VCs, and was an investor at Lux Capital. Brendan served in the U.S. Navy as a submarine officer, spending 600+ days underwater. Brendan is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Center for New American Security, Member of the U.S. Special Operations Forces Technology Advisory Group, and Term Member of Council on Foreign Relations. He holds an SB from MIT and an MBA from HBS.
Cathy O’Neil
Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then switched over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She left finance in 2011 and started working as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene, building models that predicted people’s purchases and clicks. She wrote Doing Data Science in 2013 and launched the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia in 2014. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View and wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. She recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company.
David Parkes
David C. Parkes is the George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science in the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. He is faculty co-lead for planning the expansion of the Paulson school into the Allston campus, and co-director of the Harvard/2u Business Analytics certificate program. He founded the EconCS research group, which pursues work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and economics. His research focuses on the design of incentive-aligned,multi-agent systems, and envisions a future where economic transactions are mediated by automated software agents. Together with students and colleagues, he has designed novel mechanisms for combinatorial auctions, planning, and information elicitation. These methods consider complex and competing interests in promoting optimal solutions, and find application throughout the digital economy, including to problems of pricing, matching, personalization and reputation. In recent work he has pioneered the use of machine learning for the automated design of revenue optimal auctions that have defied theoretical analysis. He teaches in both applied mathematics and computer science, including courses on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and optimization. Parkes served on the inaugural panel of the "Stanford 100 Year Study on Artificial Intelligence," co- organized the 2016 OSTP Workshop on "AI for Social Good," and served as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (2011–16). Parkes is Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and recipient of the 2017 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Thouron Scholarship, and the Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching. Parkes has degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, serves on several international scientific advisory boards, and has been a technical advisor to a number of start-ups.
Nancy Potok
Nancy Potok is the Chief Statistician of the United States, directing statistical and science policy at the US Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President and leading the U.S. statistical community internationally. Dr. Potok has over 30 years of leadership experience in the public, non-profit, and private sectors. She served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer, as well as CFO, of the U.S. Census Bureau and Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce; Senior Vice President for Economic, Labor, and Population Studies at NORC at the University of Chicago; and Chief Operating Officer at McManis & Monsalve Associates, a business analytics consulting firm. She was appointed as a Commissioner on the congressionally chartered Commission on Evidence-based Policy Making, which submitted its recommendations and report to Congress and the President in September 2017. Dr. Potok is an adjunct professor at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University. She is the recipient of the Presidential Rank Award, the Secretary of Commerce Gold Medal and Silver Medals for outstanding achievements, the Arthur S. Flemming Award, the Enterprise Risk Manager of the Year Award given by the Association for Federal Enterprise Risk Management, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from The George Washington University. Dr. Potok is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in public policy and public administration at The George Washington University.
Katie Shah
Katherine (Katie) Shah is a magna cum laude graduate in math and philosophy from Duke University, she has an MBA from Stanford, attended the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and studied for an MFA at Christie’s Education in London. For a dozen years Katie worked on special projects for the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These projects included evaluating business opportunities, analyzing customer data, identifying both cost and revenue areas for margin improvement, and creating and editing presentations for the Board of Trustees. The last several years Katie has been raising her four kids full time and volunteering with their schools and other organizations. She has been a member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean’s Council as well as the Dean’s Council for Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is now beginning to look at some consulting projects as two of her kids are in college. She and her husband, Dhiren Shah and their children live in New York City.
David Spiegelhalter
David Spiegelhalter is a statistician with a background is in Bayesian statistics. He jointly developed the Lauritzen-Spiegelhalter algorithm for exact evidence propagation in Bayesian networks, and then led the team behind the BUGS software for MCMC analysis of Bayesian models. He is now Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He has over 200 refereed publications and is co-author of 6 textbooks, as well as The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), Sex by Numbers, and The Art of Statistics. He works extensively with the media, and presented the BBC4 documentaries ‘Tails you Win: the Science of Chance” and the award-winning “Climate Change by Numbers”. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, and was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018.
Hal Varian
Hal R. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google. He started in May 2002 as a consultant and has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy and public policy. He is also an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley in three departments: business, economics, and information management. He received his SB degree from MIT in 1969 and his MA in mathematics and Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1973. He has also taught at MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan and other universities around the world. Dr. Varian is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was Co-Editor of the American Economic Review from 1987-1990 and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Oulu, Finland and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Gaurav Vazirani
Gaurav serves as the managing director for LabXchange, an online science education platform aimed at facilitating the discovery and authentic experience of the scientific process. Gaurav is also the founder and executive director of Wireless Philosophy, an online platform aimed at introducing people to the practice of philosophy and critical thinking. Gaurav earned his Bachelors in Philosophy at Rutgers University and his M. Phil from Yale University.
Ronald L. Wasserstein
Ron Wasserstein has served as the executive director of the American Statistical Association (ASA) since August 2007. In this role, he provides executive leadership and management for the association and is responsible for ensuring that the ASA fulfills its mission to promote the practice and profession of statistics. Wasserstein joined the association in 1983 and has been active as a volunteer and held leadership positions in multiple chapters and sections. Prior to joining the ASA, Wasserstein was a mathematics and statistics department faculty member and administrator at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., from 1984–2007. During his last seven years at the school, he served as the university’s vice president for academic affairs. Wasserstein is a Fellow of the ASA and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was presented the John Ritchie Alumni Award and Muriel Clarke Student Life Award from Washburn University and the Manning Distinguished Service Award from the North American Association of Summer Schools.
Herbert Winokur Jr.
Herbert S. "Pug" Winokur, Jr. has been Chairman and CEO of Capricorn Holdings, Inc., since 1987, and the managing partner of partnerships which invest in, or acquire, companies with the potential for long-term capital appreciation. He currently is an investor in a number of growth equity companies in the energy, defense and technology sectors. Over his career, he held leadership positions at Penn Central Corporation and served three years as a U.S. Army officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Winokur is a co-Founder and former Chairman of ICF Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in policy planning for senior government and business officials, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, a board member of Ithaka Harbors, Inc. and of Squash Haven (which he co-founded). He holds a PhD from Harvard in Decision and Control Theory and served on the Harvard Corporation.
Jeannette Wing
Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. From 2013-2017 she was a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research. She is Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where she twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department and had been on the faculty since 1985. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from MIT. Wing’s research interests are in trustworthy computing, with a current focus on trustworthy AI. She serves on 13 editorial boards and many academic, industry, and government advisory boards. She received the Distinguished Service Award from both the CRA and ACM. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.
Marjorie Yang
Marjorie Yang is the Chairman of Esquel Group, a leading Hong Kong-based textile and apparel manufacturer with operations throughout the world. Marjorie serves as Chairman of the Seoul International Business Advisory Council (SIBAC). She is also a Hong Kong, China representative to APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), and a member of Chief Executive’s Council of Advisers on Innovation and Strategic Development. Marjorie is the Co-chairman of the advisory board of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT and the Chairperson of the Steering Committee of CoolThink@JC. She also serves as a member of various advisory boards including Harvard University, Harvard Business School, MIT Work of the Future, MIT Sloan, Tsinghua University’s School of Economics & Management and served as Council Chariman of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Marjorie is an Independent Non-executive Director for The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (Asia Pacific).
Editorial Office
Alyson Gamble
Research Associate
Alyson Gamble is the Research Associate for the Harvard Data Science Review, where they provide research support for developing and executing this innovative model for digital outreach in data science. Alyson is a doctoral student in Library and Information Science at Simmons University and holds a Master of Library and Information Science from Louisiana State University, a Master of Liberal Arts from Tulane University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Spring Hill College. Prior to entering doctoral studies, they worked as a science librarian and instructed undergraduates in publishing an open access journal.
Paige Sammartino
Editorial and Administrative Coordinator
Paige Sammartino is the Editorial and Administrative Coordinator for the Harvard Data Science Review. In this capacity, she facilitates manuscript submission, review, and production processes for the journal, as well as supports the Editor-in-Chief and editorial staff. In addition to her work with the journal, she teaches undergraduate writing and literature courses as an adjunct professor. Paige holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College and an Master of Arts in Children’s Literature from Simmons University.