joshua loftus

Assistant Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics. Find my full cv here.

I’m a first-generation college graduate who went from homeschooling, to community college, and eventually to finishing a PhD in Statistics at Stanford University. I’m grateful for the opportunities and to the teachers who helped me along the way. Diversity, inclusion, and mentoring are part of my identity. In my teaching I want to empower students to use the powerful tools of data science for good.

My research focuses on practices in machine learning and data science pipelines with the goal of correcting biases that are often overlooked. Some key applications include finding and repairing the causes of the replication crisis in science and socially harmful applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. My peer reviewed research has been published in the Annals of Statistics, Biometrika, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Education

  • Ph.D. Statistics, (Biostatistics trainee), Stanford University, 2016.
  • M.A. Mathematics, (concentration in computational biology), Rutgers University, 2011.
  • B.S. Mathematics, (summa cum laude), Western Michigan University, 2009.
  • A.A. Kalamazoo Valley Community College, 2007.

Experience

  • Assistant Professor, London School of Economics, Department of Statistics, and Affiliate of the Data Science Institute, 2021-present.
  • Assistant Professor, New York University, Department of Technology, Operations, and Statistics, and Affiliate of the Center for Data Science, 2017-2020.
  • Research Fellow, Alan Turing Institute and University of Cambridge, 2016-17.

The meaning of “Neurath’s Speedboat”

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship” while traveling at 90mph