Cornell University is expanding its expertise in artificial intelligence and data science thanks to the arrival of the following faculty members as part of a special collaborative program: danah boyd, Jelena Bradic, Maryam Fazel, Shoham Sabach, and Jiang-Xun Wang.
These faculty join Cornell with support from the Radical Collaboration initiative, a program of the Office of the Provost that seeks to build a research community that reaches across disciplines to tackle society's most complex challenges and to make breakthrough discoveries. The initiative's artificial intelligence and data science focus areas are overseen by the Cornell AI Initiative and the Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society (CDSES) respectively.
"These intellectual giants will bring new strengths to Cornell, not just within their home departments, but across the full space of units with a projection on data science, especially since for many of these hires, more than one department would have been excited to have them join," said David Shmoys, Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Management & Leadership Studies in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering and director of CDSES.
"These leaders in their respective fields reflect Cornell's broad vision for AI and Data Science," said Thorsten Joachims, vice provost for AI strategy and director of the AI Initiative and Radical Collaboration, "and they reflect how we are collaborating across disciplines to advance our understanding and the state of the art in AI."
The newest hires in artificial intelligence and data science include:
danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). With research interests from the politics of data to how youth come of age, boyd's research explores contestations that emerge at the intersection of technology and society. . Her current work examines the sociotechnical, political, and organizational practices behind the making of democracy's data, distilled in her newly released book, Data Are Made, Not Found. Prior to Cornell, boyd was a researcher with Microsoft Research, where she spent over a decade researching how young people use social media as part of their everyday practices. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley.
Jelena Bradic is a professor of statistics and data science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and CALS. Bradic's research centers on causal inference, machine learning, and robust statistics, with applications in public health and policy learning. Most recently, Bradic was a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in operations research and financial engineering, specializing in statistics and applied probability, from Princeton University.
Maryam Fazel will join the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Duffield Engineering in spring 2027 as a professor. Her current research interests are optimization in machine learning and AI, deep learning theory, learning and control, and reinforcement learning. Fazel comes from the University of Washington, where she currently holds the Moorthy Family Inspiration Career Development Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering and is the director and lead PI of the NSF-funded Institute for Foundations of Data Science. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from Stanford University and her B.S. from Sharif University of Technology in Iran.
Shoham Sabach has joined the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering in Duffield Engineering as an associate professor. His research focuses on mathematical optimization, spanning both theoretical foundations and applications in areas such as machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence. Prior to Cornell, he was an associate professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and served as an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Research, where he worked on optimization for large-scale AI systems, including large language models. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Technion in 2012.
Jiang-Xun Wang is an associate professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in Duffield Engineering where he leads the Computational Mechanics and Scientific AI Lab. Wang's research integrates AI, physics-based models and advanced numerical methods to predict complex systems, with applications ranging from more efficient aircraft, to understanding blood flow in patients, to improving manufacturing processes and predicting environmental contaminants. Previously, Wang was the Robert W. Huether Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Virginia Tech.
The Radical Collaboration hiring initiative in artificial intelligence and data science was a cross-campus effort in 2025, 2026, 2027 including: CDSES, the Cornell AI Initiative, Brooks School of Public Policy, College of Arts and Science, College of Agriculture and Life Science, Cornell Bowers, and Duffield Engineering.
