Faculty

Diane Woodbridge is an assistant professor in the MS in Data Science program at the University of San Francisco. Her research interests include database management systems, data fusion and data mining in various domains including biomedical, geoscience and geospatial remote sensing. Prior to joining USF, Professor Woodbridge was with the scalable analysis and visualization department at Sandia National Laboratories.

Aija Tapaninen has been with USF since 2014. Prior to joining the MSDS program team, she has held positions in the Strategic Enrollment Management division and at the School of Management, working with the campus community on a range of topics related to graduate student education. Before USF, Aija was in graduate admissions and student affairs at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

David is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. His research interests are natural language processing, machine learning, and databases — specifically on the personal and cultural/demographic information transmitted during speech and typing. This research may lead to more accurate speech recognition systems.

Prior to joining USF, David was a research assistant in the Speech Lab at Queens College and an instructor at Hunter College. He has previously worked for the City of...

Cody Carroll is an assistant professor with joint appointments in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Master's in Data Science program (MSDS). He holds a PhD and MS in Statistics from the University of California, Davis and a BS in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. His methodological research interests focus on functional and longitudinal data, particularly in the context of human growth and aging, and his interdisciplinary work has spanned a wide range of...

Robert Clements is an assistant professor in the MS in Data Science program. His interests include making data science concepts more accessible to a general audience through visual methods, and combining data, code and models with art. Prior to joining USF he had a nearly ten-year career in industry, holding several positions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area as a data scientist and data science manager/director, working primarily in developing machine learning models in different domains...

Stephen Devlin is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Master’s in Data Science program (MSDS). He has also served as department chair and director of the undergraduate data science program. Stephen has a bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College in New York, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland. He was a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT before moving to the University of San Francisco. His research interests include both pure and applied...

Mustafa Hajij is an assistant professor at the MSDS program at University of San Francisco. He received his masters in Computer Science, PhD in Mathematics from Louisiana State University and postdoctoral training at the computer science departments at University of South Florida and Ohio State University. Before joining  MSDS program he was an assistant professor at the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Santa Clara University. Prior to SCU, he spent a year as an AI research...

As the Senior Director of the Data Institute, Jeff Hamrick is responsible for the Institute's vision and strategic planning process, as well as its various centers and initiatives. Professor Hamrick has been instrumental in developing the University of San Francisco’s Master of Science in Data Science (MSDS) program. He has previously taught in the Master of Science in Financial Analysis (MSFA) program at the School of Management, where he holds a joint appointment.

For the MSDS program, he...

Yannet is an associate professor in the Master’s in Data Science program, and her research interests lie in the application of machine learning and deep learning to medical data. She holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell University and a BS in mathematics from the University of Havana, Cuba. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, she worked for five years as a data scientist at Google. Yannet co-founded Akualab, a start-up that helped organizations develop data-driven products...

Victor received his master's degree in data science from the University of San Francisco and is currently working in the same field at the University of San Francisco as the Director of Data Science Partnerships. He teaches and mentors courses on data science, machine learning, Python, and KNIME. His initial projects and interests were in the deception detection space and also in health care, but originally his love of data science blossomed from natural language processing in the translation...

Shan is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco and currently teaching full time for USF's Data Science programs. Her research interests are nonparametric estimation, prediction models, and applied statistics. Shan also works closely with experts from different fields. She has experiences in NIH and NSF grants in cancer research and GIS. She holds a PhD in statistics from Purdue University (IUPUI campus) and a BS in mathematics from Fudan University in China.

James is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Co-Director of the BS in Data Science program at the University of San Francisco. He has joint appointments in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the MS in Data Science program, where he has developed and taught courses in Bayesian statistics, machine learning, data science, and network analysis.

In research, James develops new statistical and computational techniques to model, analyze, and explore high-dimensional and relational...

Sundar Dorai-Raj has been a data scientist at Google since 2009. He has spent most of his career working on Ads products, from YouTube Ads, where he helped launch YouTube's first skippable ad format, to Brand Lift and Google Analytics. He currently manages a team of data scientists who focus on privacy-centric analytics, quantifying the effectiveness of YouTube advertising, and Bayesian methods for online experiments. His expertise includes A/B testing, statistical modeling, machine learning...

In 2006 Uri Schonfeld received his masters degree from the Technion in Israel. His thesis introduced a technique for duplicate detection on the web, avoiding the need to download some duplicate pages.

Working on his PhD at UCLA, Uri Schonfeld's research focused on web crawling and web search. In addition, Uri started a group that did some early research on the young social network Twitter. Uri received his PhD from UCLA in 2011.

At Yahoo Labs, Uri worked on the knowledge graph, focusing on...

Nathaniel is interested in using data to make decisions, solve problems, and improve processes. Specifically, his research interests lie in methodological development at the intersection of data science and industrial statistics; his publications span topics including experimental design and A/B testing, social network modeling and monitoring, survival and reliability analysis, measurement system analysis, and the development of estimation-based alternatives to traditional hypothesis testing...