About Me
Welcome. I’m Kai — a PhD student in the Operations, Information and Decisions Department at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an affiliate of the Centre for Causal Inference at Penn Biostat. I am very fortunate to be advised by Dean Knox.
I grew up in Birmingham, UK (but support Arsenal FC). Before joining Penn, I obtained a master’s degree in mathematics from Imperial College London, during which I was grateful to spend a year studying abroad at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
When not in the office, you’ll find me: at the cinema, playing football or badminton, or reading or watching some dystopian science-fiction.
Research Interest
I study causal inference in theory and application. My research broadly follows two streams: (i) developing (algorithmic) partial identification strategies which permit causal inferences in challenging data environments; (ii) applying modern causal inference techniques to policy evaluation and investigate fairness in social and institutional settings, e.g. police enforcement and education.
News
- Oct 17, 2025. Workshop. I, along with my advisor Dean Knox, will be delivering a talk and workshop on the applications of the new autobounds software at Data Science Frontiers (Society and Politics) conference in New York.
- Apr 18, 2025. Parallel Talk. My work, “Using Causal Inference to Unmask Racial Discrimination in Traffic Enforcement via Proxies,” has been accepted for a parallel talk at the International Computational Social Science Conference (IC2S2) 2025 in Norrkoping, Sweden!
- Apr 11, 2025. Poster Presentation. My poster, “Using Causal Inference to Unmask Racial Discrimination in Traffic Enforcement via Proxies,” has been accepted for presentation at ACIC 2025 in Detroit!
- Apr 2, 2025. Parallel Talk. My contributed submission, “Quantifying Causal Effects via Temporal Regression Discontinuity Designs with Time-Varying Effects,” has been accepted for a 15-minute presentation at the Joint Statistical Meetings 2025 in Nashville, TN!
I don’t read the [manu]script, the [manu]script reads me
Kirk Lazarus, Vietnam 2008