Dan Kowal Ph.D. ’17 will join the faculty in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science as an associate professor of statistics and data science, beginning July 1, 2024.
Since receiving his doctoral degree in statistics from Cornell, Kowal has served as the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. He returns to Cornell Bowers CIS’s Department of Statistics and Data Science (SDS) via an appointment through Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), one of two other colleges that comprise SDS.
In joining Cornell Bowers CIS, Kowal is the college’s 12th new faculty member hired in the 2023-2024 academic year.
“As a Ph.D. alumnus, I've closely followed the impressive growth and developments in SDS, as well as the exciting new initiatives and collaborative opportunities in Bowers CIS and CALS,” Kowal said. “It is a tremendous privilege to join the Cornell faculty and to contribute to the exceptional research, teaching, and advising at Cornell – much of which shaped my own academic journey.”
Kowal’s research revolves around three themes: Bayesian models and algorithms for large and dependent data; modeling, synthesis, and imputation of mixed data; and predictive inference for more interpretable uncertainty quantification. He directs his research toward open questions in public health, epidemiology, and environmental justice, physical activity data, economics, and finance. Recently, Kowal has worked on addressing urgent issues related to racial inequities and biases in statistical modeling.
His research has been published widely in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Bayesian Analysis, Annals of Applied Statistics, and Journal of Machine Learning Research, among others.
His awards and honors include the inaugural Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award (2021), a Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office (2020), and the Arnold Zellner Thesis Award (honorable mention) in Econometrics and Statistics (2018).
During his doctoral studies at Cornell, Kowal was advised by David Ruppert, the Andrew Schultz Jr. Professor of Engineering in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), and professor of statistics and data science, and David Matteson, associate department chair and professor of statistics and data science and social statistics.
Kowal received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, with minors in computer science and legal studies, from Washington University of St. Louis.
By Louis DiPietro, a writer with the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.