Kosuke Imai is a professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He is also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai taught at Princeton University for 15 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 to 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. He specializes in the development of statistical methods and machine learning algorithms and their applications to social science research. His areas of expertise include causal inference, computational social science, program evaluation, and survey methodology. His substantive applications range from the randomized evaluation of Mexican and Indian national health insurance programs to the assessment of pretrial public safety assessment in the United States criminal justice system.
Imai is the author of a widely used undergraduate introductory statistics textbook for social scientists, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2017). He has published more than seventy peer-refereed journal articles in political science, statistics, and other fields, and authored over twenty open-source software packages. Imai has been recognized as a highly cited researcher in the cross-field category by Clarivate Analytics since 2018. 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, 2021), the Excellence in Mentoring Award (2021), and was the inaugural recipient of Society of Political Methodology’s Emerging Scholar Award (2011). Imai’s research has been supported by National Science Foundation grants as well as grants from other government agencies and private organizations.