Kosuke Imai is a professor in the Department of
Government and the Department of
Statistics at Harvard
University. He is also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative
Social Science. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai
taught at Princeton
University for 15 years where he was the founding
director of the Program
in Statistics and Machine Learning.
In addition, Imai served as the President of the Society for Political
Methodology from 2017 to 2019 and was elected fellow in
2017.
After obtaining a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of
Tokyo (1998), Imai received an A.M. in Statistics (2002) and a
Ph.D. in political science (2003) from Harvard University. He
specializes in the development of statistical methods and machine
learning algorithms and their applications to social science research.
His areas of expertise include causal inference, computational social
science, program evaluation, and survey methodology. His substantive
applications range from the randomized evaluation of Mexican and
Indian national health insurance programs to the assessment of
pretrial public safety assessment in the United States criminal
justice system. Imai also served as an expert witness in several
high-profile legislative redistricting cases, applying his simulation
algorithms.
Imai has authored two widely used undergraduate introductory
statistics textbooks for social scientists, Quantitative
Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University
Press, 2017) and Data
Analysis for Social Science: A Friendly and Practical
Introduction (with Elena Llaudet; Princeton University
Press, 2022). He has published more than eighty peer-refereed journal
articles in political science, statistics, and other fields, and
authored over twenty open-source software packages. Imai has been
recognized as a highly cited researcher by Clarivate Analytics since
2018. He has won several awards including the Warren Miller Prize
(2008), the Pi Sigma Alpha Award (2013), the Excellence in Mentoring
Award (2021), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), and was the inaugural
recipient of Society of Political Methodology's Emerging Scholar Award
(2011). Imai's research has been supported by National Science
Foundation grants as well as grants from other government agencies and
private organizations.