Hamsa Bastani, PhD

Biography

Hamsa Bastani, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions as well as Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she co-directs the Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab. She develops novel machine learning algorithms for learning and optimization, including methods for sequential decision-making, transfer learning, and designing effective human-AI interfaces.

She is also passionate about applying these techniques to tackle impactful societal problems, and has worked closely with national governments to deploy algorithms at the country-scale to improve public health outcomes. For example, she worked with the Government of Greece to improve their national border COVID screening via reinforcement learning, and the Government of Sierra Leone to improve their national essential medicine distribution via decision-aware learning. Her research has been published in leading outlets including Nature, Management Science, and Operations Research, and has received numerous recognitions, including the Wagner Prize, the Pierskalla Award, and the George Nicholson Prize.