Rachel Schutt, Professor
Rachel Schutt is a Senior Statistician at Google Research in the New York office and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Columbia’s Statistics Department. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in Statistics, and Masters degrees in Mathematics and Operations Research from the Courant Institute (NYU) and Stanford University, respectively. Her undergraduate degree is in Honors Mathematics from the University of Michigan. She was a lead analyst on the Google+ Data Science Team and is now focused on other (confidential) Google projects. She holds several pending patents. Her statistical research interests include modeling and analyzing social networks, epidemiology, hierarchical modeling and Bayesian statistics. Her education-related research interests include curriculum design.
She enjoys designing and creating complex, thought-provoking situations for other people. She won the Howard Levene Outstanding Teaching Award at Columbia and also taught probability and statistics at Cooper Union, and remedial math as a high school teacher in San Jose, CA. She was a mathematics curriculum expert for the Princeton Review, and won a game design award for best family game at the Come Out and Play Festival in New York.
Jared Lander, Lab Instructor
Jared Lander is a data science consultant based in New York City. With a masters from Columbia University in statistics and a bachelors from Muhlenberg College in mathematics, he has experience in both academic research and industry. His work for both large and small organizations ranges from music and fund raising to finance and humanitarian relief efforts. He recently became co-organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming (formerly R) meetup and is the author of an upcoming book aimed at teaching R to Nonstatisticians. A sampling of his projects can be found at www.jaredlander.com.
Benjamin Reddy, Teaching Assistant
Ben Reddy is a second-year PhD student in the statistics department at Columbia. Thankfully, no one has made him decide on a dissertation topic, as he finds something new to be fascinated by on a daily basis. In previous lives he has been a physicist, an economist, and a fry cook. In his free time he races bicycles and likes to explore his neighborhood algorithmically.
Cathy O’Neil, Data Journalist
Cathy O’Neil, aka mathbabe holds her PhD from Harvard in mathematics. She has worked variously as a math professor at Barnard College, a quant at DE Shaw, and in lead data scientist positions. She is active in the Occupy Wall Street movement. For the purposes of this class, she is serving as a data journalist. She reports from the weekly Wednesday lectures to explain everything that happened in her usual clear and insightful way.
