Jasjeet Sekhon, who conducts research on causal inference, machine learning, and experimental design, has been named the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and of Statistics and Data Science. His appointment was effective Feb. 20.
A member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Sekhon has applied his work across the social sciences, including political science, economics, and epidemiology. His research focuses on methods for causal inference in observational and experimental studies and evaluating social science, public health and medical interventions. He has studied elections, voting behavior, and public opinion in the U.S., multivariate matching methods for causal inference, machine learning algorithms for irregular optimization problems, robust estimators with bounded influence functions, health economic cost effectiveness analysis, and the philosophy and history of inference and statistics in the social sciences.
Sekhon’s current research focuses on developing interpretable and credible machine learning methods for estimating causal relationships.
He earned a B.A. at the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. at Cornell University. He has extensive industry experience, including as the Head of Advanced Data Science at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based asset management firm.
In 2020, he came to Yale from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Robson Professor of Political Science and Statistics. Before Berkeley, he was an associate professor at Harvard University. At Yale, he is a faculty fellow with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.