Rachel Cummings, Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, has been selected for the Inaugural Early Career Faculty Impact Fellowship. Cummings is one of just six faculty members selected for the 2023-2024 cohort.
The Early Career Faculty Impact Fellowship: Advancing Research and Scholarship to Action is a new part-time, year-long program from Columbia World Projects (CWP) for early career faculty at Columbia University. The Fellowship will support faculty in deepening their expertise in interdisciplinary, applied research for social impact and advancing their research to policy or impact.
Rachel Cummings' research interests lie primarily in data privacy, with connections to machine learning, algorithmic economics, optimization, statistics, and information theory. Her work has focused on problems such as strategic aspects of data generation, incentivizing truthful reporting of data, privacy-preserving algorithm design, impacts of privacy policy, and human decision-making.
Specifically, her work focuses on differential privacy, which is a parameterized notion of database privacy that gives a mathematically rigorous worst-case bound on the maximum amount of information that can be learned about an individual's data from the output of a computation. If you would like more information on the Early Career Faculty Impact Fellowship, you can see the original article published by Columbia World Projects.
