Zach Branson
Assistant Teaching Professor (on leave Fall 2024)
Bio
I joined Carnegie Mellon University’s Statistics and Data Science Department in 2019. Before that, I received my Ph.D. in Statistics at Harvard University, where I was advised by Tirthankar Dasgupta and Luke Miratrix. As a graduate student, I received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to study the design and analysis of complex experiments and observational studies. Meanwhile, I completed my undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, where I received a B.S. in Economics and Statistics and a B.A. in Professional Writing.
Specific Research Interests
My main research interests are experimental design and causal inference. Most of my work tackles theoretical/methodological/applied questions that can be posed as, "Does a treatment cause a change in outcomes?" Meanwhile, my main teaching interests are (1) teaching causality/design topics to undergraduates and non-statistics audiences, and (2) statistical communications (writing, presentations, and visualizations). If you're an undergraduate CMU student interested in research, I recommend taking one of our capstone courses, which I and other faculty are involved in most semesters.