Kosuke Imai
Kosuke Imai, Ph.D., is Professor of Government and of Statistics at Harvard University.
Professor Imai specializes in the development of statistical methods and machine learning algorithms and their applications to social science research.
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, he 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. 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 (2017) and Data Analysis for Social Science: A Friendly and Practical Introduction (with Elena Llaudet, 2022). He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed 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. According to Google Scholar, his published work has been cited more than 50,000 times. He has won several awards including the Warren Miller Prize (2008), the Pi Sigma Alpha Award (2013), the Excellence in Mentoring Award (2021), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2024). He was the inaugural recipient of the Society of Political Methodology’s Emerging Scholar Award (2011).
You can visit his university webpages here and here.
You can visit his personal webpage here.