KOSUKE IMAI
Professor of Government and Statistics
Kosuke Imai is Professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard and an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai taught at Princeton University for fifteen years where he was the founding director of the Program in Statistics and Machine Learning. In addition, Imai served as the President of the Society for Political Methodology from 2017-2019 and was elected fellow in 2017. He has been Professor of Visiting Status in the Faculty of Law and Graduate Schools of Law and Politics at the University of Tokyo.
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 research area is political methodology and more generally applied statistics in the social sciences. He has extensively worked on the development and applications of statistical methods for causal inference with experimental and observational data. Other areas of his methodological research include survey methodology and computational algorithms for data-intensive social science research. His substantive applications range from the randomized evaluation of Mexican universal health insurance program to the study of public opinion and insurgent violence in Afghanistan.
Imai is the author of a widely used undergraduate statistics textbook for social scientists, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2017). He has published more than fifty peer-refereed journal articles in political science, statistics, and other fields, and authored over ten open-source software packages. Imai has been recognized as a highly cited researcher in the cross-field category by Clarivate Analytics (2018, 2019). In addition, he has won several awards including the Miyake Award (2006), the Warren Miller Prize (2008), the Pi Sigma Alpha Award (2013), the Stanley Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award (2013), the Statistical Software Award (2015), and he was the inaugural recipient of Society of Political Methodology's Emerging Scholar Award (2011). Imai's research has been supported by several National Science Foundation grants as well as grants from other agencies.