NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Joshua Blumenstock is an Assistant Professor at the Information School, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and founder and co-Director of the Data Science and Analytics Lab at the University of Washington. His research develops theory and methods for the analysis of large-scale behavioral data, with a focus on how such data can be used to better understand poverty and economic development. Recent projects combine field experiments with big spatiotemporal network data to model decision-making in poor and conflict-affected regions of the world. Prior to joining UW, Joshua was a postdoc in the Department of Economics at Yale University. He has a Ph.D. in Information Science and a M.A. in Economics from U.C. Berkeley, and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Physics from Wesleyan University. He is a recipient of the Intel Faculty Early Career Honor, a Gates Millenium Grand Challenge Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and is a former fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Harvard Institutes of Medicine.