Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School

Current instructors

Jake Hofman

Jake Hofman (opens in new tab) is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, where his work in computational social science involves applications of statistics and machine learning to large-scale social data. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a member of the Microeconomics and Social Systems group at Yahoo! Research. Jake is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, where he has designed and taught classes on a number of topics ranging from biological physics to applied machine learning. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University

Siddhartha Sen

Siddhartha Sen (opens in new tab) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, and previously at the MSR Silicon Valley lab. He creates distributed systems that use novel data structures and algorithms to deliver unprecedented functionality or performance. Some of his data structures have been incorporated into undergraduate textbooks and curricula. Recently, he has generalized this approach to use contextual machine learning to optimize decisions in distributed systems infrastructure. Siddhartha received his BS degrees in computer science and mathematics and his MEng degree in computer science from MIT. From 2004-2007 he worked as a developer at Microsoft and built a network load balancer for Windows Server. He completed his PhD from Princeton University in 2013. Siddhartha received the first Google Fellowship in Fault-Tolerant Computing in 2009, the best student paper award at PODC 2012, and the best paper award at ASPLOS 2017.

Dan Goldstein

Dan Goldstein (opens in new tab) works at the intersection of behavioral economics and computer science. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dan was a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo Research and a marketing professor at London Business School. He received his Ph.D. at The University of Chicago and has taught and researched at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and Max Planck Institute in Germany, where he was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal in 1997. His academic writings have appeared in journals from Science to Psychological Review. Dan is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the UK’s Behavioral Insights Team (aka Britain’s “nudge unit”). He was elected President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making for the year 2015-2016.

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Will Wang

Will Wang is a predoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in the Economics and Computation group. At MSR, he works on projects examining how generative AI is influencing the workforce. His own research interests include the economic dynamics of urban settings, including housing markets and transportation networks, and their political determinants. He graduated from Yale in 2022 with a B.S. in environmental engineering and is starting a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in real estate in fall 2026.

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Hanna Cha

Hannah Cha is a predoctoral research assistant in the CSS group at MSR-NYC and works closely the FATE team. She is a master’s student at Stanford University in Computer Science (AI) and previously earned her B.S. at Stanford in Symbolic Systems (HCI) with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research interests involve evaluating harms from AI systems that disproportionately impact marginalized groups. Previously, she worked on Responsible AI at Salesforce and privacy-enhancing ML at Reddit.

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Past instructors & contributors

Many individuals have contributed to the Data Science Summer School in the past, notably Sharad Goel (opens in new tab) and Justin Rao (opens in new tab), who co-founded the program.