Photo of Eli Ben-Michael

Eli Ben-Michael

Assistant Professor, Heinz College and Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University

I am the Heinz College Dean’s Career Development Assistant Professor of Statistics and Public Policy, jointly appointed in the Heinz College of Information Systems & Public Policy and the Department of Statistics & Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also affiliated with the CMU-NIST AI Measurement Science & Engineering Cooperative Research Center (AIMSEC). Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. I received my PhD in Statistics from U.C. Berkeley and I spent my undergraduate years at Columbia University where I received a bachelors degree in computer science and statistics.

My research focuses on developing statistical and computational methods to solve practical issues in public policy and social science research. I am particularly interested in bringing together ideas from statistics, optimization, and artificial intelligence to create methods for credible and robust causal inference and data-driven decision making.

Contact

Email: ebenmichael@cmu.edu
Office: 2220 Hamburg Hall

Note on PhD admissions: I work with students in both the Statistics & Data Science PhD Programs and the Heinz College PhD Programs. There is also a joint program between the two. For any of these programs, individual faculty do not recruit and accept individual students; all applicants are considered as a whole and offered admission into the program regardless of which faculty member they eventually plan to work with. If you are interested in working with me, please reach out after the admissions process.

Recent papers

  1. Bridging Predictions and Interventions: An Integrated Framework for Automated Decision-Systems

    Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Lydia T. Liu, Angela Zhou, Luke Guerdan, Jessica Hullman, Daniel Malinsky, Bryan Wilder, Simone Zhang, Hammaad Adam, Amanda Coston, Ben Laufer, Ezinne Nwankwo, Michael Zanger-Tishler, Eli Ben-Michael, Avi Feller, Talia Gillis, Shion Guha, Daniel Ho, Lily Hu, Kosuke Imai, Sayash Kapoor, Joshua Loftus, Razieh Nabi, Juan Carlos Perdomo, Matthew Salganik, Mark Sendak, Berk Ustun, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Angelina Wang, Ashia Wilson

    2026

  2. A Weighting Framework for Clusters as Confounders in Observational Studies

    Eli Ben-Michael, Avi Feller, Luke Keele

    2026

  3. Forest Kernel Balancing Weights: Outcome-Guided Features for Causal Inference

    Andy A. Shen, Eli Ben-Michael, Avi Feller, Luke Keele, Jared Murray

    Statistics in Medicine, 2026

  4. Learning Who to Treat When Treatment is Missing

    Johnna Sundberg, Rayid Ghani, Eli Ben-Michael, Edward Kennedy

    Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 2026

  5. AI-Assisted Variance Reduction in Randomized Experiments

    David Arbour, Eli Ben-Michael, Avi Feller, Apoorva Lal, Lo-Hua Yuan

    SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2026

All research →