Dr. Rachel Cummings is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. She is also an Affiliate in the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy) and a Co-chair of the Cybersecurity Research Center at the Data Science Institute. Before joining Columbia, she was an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests lie primarily in data privacy, with connections to machine learning, algorithmic economics, optimization, statistics, and public policy. 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.
Dr. Cummings received her Ph.D. in Computing and Mathematical Sciences from the California Institute of Technology, her M.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and her B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an Apple Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Award, a JP Morgan Chase Faculty Award, a Google Research Fellowship, a Mozilla Research Grant, the ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention, the Amori Doctoral Prize in Computing and Mathematical Sciences, a Simons Award for Graduate Students in Theoretical Computer Science, and Best Paper Awards at SaTML (2023), CCS (2021) and DISC (2014). Dr. Cummings also serves on the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council’s Privacy Committee and the Future of Privacy Forum’s Advisory Board.
