About me

I’m a senior research scientist at Flatiron Institute. My research interests are in computational statistics, simulation, applied statistics methodology, and in applying Bayesian statistics to science. I work primarily on Stan, a probabilistic programming language and inference engine.

I previously spent ten years as a research scientist at Columbia Univeristy, where I co-founded the Stan project, designed its programming language and automatic differentiation library, answered user and developer queries, and wrote code, documentation, and research grants. Stan wouldn’t be where it is today without its amazing crew of developers and supportive community of users and educators.

Before Columbia, I spent ten years writing production code in industry for speech recognition, search, and natural language processing. Before that, I spent a dozen years as an academic at Bell Labs and as a professor of computational linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on natural language syntax, semantics, parsing, and programming language theory. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in cognitive science and computer science and my B.S. at Michigan State University in math.